Palit Revolution 700 Deluxe 2GB GDDR5 Video Card Review

Heat & Acoustics

Even though the performance of the Revolution isn’t that much better than the stock HD 4870 X2, where it really comes into its own is in the temperature department. Due to heatsink layout, the temperatures on a reference HD 4870 X2 always vary quite a bit from core to core since one benefits from its proximity to the far while the other is left sucking down hot air. This means the core which is furthest from the fan has higher than acceptable temperatures. Meanwhile, the Revolution takes care of this problem by giving each core its own heatsink and fan which results is significantly lower temperatures. Interestingly enough Palit’s approach also means pretty much even distribution of heat across most parts of the card as evidenced by the near equal temperatures for both cores.

Another advantage the Revolution brings to the table is a massive reduction in the amount of noise pollution over a reference card. I am sure you all remember the problems we had with the HD 4870 X2’s size-13 acoustical footprint so we were elated to hear this card producing next to no sound above that of a standard case fan. Granted, the two 80mm fans do pick up speed as the temperatures increase but not to the point where they become annoying. All in all, if you are in the market for a high-performance card without the traditional whine of high speed fans, this may be the card for you.

Power Consumption

For this test we hooked up our power supply to a UPM power meter that will log the power consumption of the whole system twice every second. In order to stress the GPU as much as possible we once again use the Batch Render test in 3DMark06 and let it run for 30 minutes to determine the peak power consumption while letting the card sit at a stable Windows desktop for 30 minutes to determine the peak idle power consumption. We have also included several other tests as well.


Up to this point, nearly everything was going in the Revolution’s favor but in the power consumption test it fell flat on its ass. Its idle power consumption is only about 20W less than the LOAD power consumption of a 65nm GTX 260 216 sporting a minor overclock. From an idle power consumption standpoint, the Revolution is a failure of epic proportions. To be honest with you, we are used to seeing cards with a custom PCB and component design do better than the reference cards so this came as quite a shock to us. Somewhere along the line, Palit’s engineers seriously misjudged how much power their flagship card would guzzle under idle conditions and didn’t do a thing to rectify the situation before release.

Luckily for Palit, the power consumption under load conditions fell pretty much within the norms of where we expected an overclocked card to be.