Hi Guys!



It has been interesting year so far for the graphics card market. This year has seen rebirth of the gamer’s card with the red team bouncing back strongly and finally offering gamer on budget cards that actually do perform well.

After almost 2 years of complete domination of enthusiast gaming market, for the first time NVIDIA is made to sweat to keep its market share. And as if 4870 and 4850 512MB versions were not enough to cause NVIDIA enough headache, ATI recently launched 1GB DDR5 version of its HD4870 graphics card to battle against the new 216 shader version of GTX260.

Today I am taking look at the Palit’s HD4870 1GB Sonic Dual Edition card. Palit has released Sonic editions of other cards as well in the past with different heatsink fan assembly. And it is indeed great to see manufacturer offer something better and different than the vanilla stock version.







Lets have a look at the card.



[BREAK=Specifications]



The Palit’s Sonic dual edition card is completely non reference card. It comes factory overclocked on both Core and Memory front and carries different cooling system. It also does not follow ATI reference design PCB.



Lets take quick look at the card specifications.



Specifications



• Bus interface: PCI Express® 2.0

• Memory Support: 1024MB GDDR5

• Memory Interface: 256 bit

• Sonic Memory / Core Clock: 3800MHz (950 x 4) / 750 MHz

• Turbo Memory / Core Clock: 4000MHz (1000 x 4) / 775 MHz

• RAMDACs: 400 MHz

• Full Microsoft® DirectX® 10.1 Shader Model 4.1 support

• Dynamic geometry acceleration

• Game physics processing capability

• ATI PowerPlay™ technology

• ATI CrossFireX™ Multi-GPU Technology

• ATI Avivo™ HD video and display technology

• HDCP capable

• HDMI Ready

• Dual Bios feature ( Oh yes! Really!)

• Built for Microsoft® Windows Vista™



Now these are some interesting features. I will discuss these on coming pages. Now lets move onto the card itself.



[BREAK=The Box]

The Box



The card came to my door by DHL in a huge box. I was wondering what it might be as honestly I didn’t expect such huge package for graphics card.







But opening the package shed the light on the size of the package.













The card itself ships in huge red Palit box advertising all its features. This is probably the biggest Graphics card box I have ever seen. Makes you wonder what all is inside.









But opening it results in only 1 smaller box containing the graphics card, and rest is all just dummy packaging to protect the all important card.



[BREAK=The Card]

The Card



The card is very different in appearance than reference ATI design cards. This one carries different Heasink.







As you can see in the picture. This cooling assembly consists of a 3 heatpipe heatsink cooled by 2 fans. 1 big fan directly over the core and 1 small one next to it.

The heatsink only cools core and does not cover the RAM. But this design is different than any other card and it’s obvious that the air from the fans directly cools the ram chips. DDR5 memory does not run very hot anyway so this should not be an issue.







The card carries 2 6pin PCI express power connectors like any other HD4870. But on this card, they are not facing side of the card but rather the top. You can also see crossfire bridge connectors there.





Nothing much to really see on the backside other than serial no and warranty warning stickers.









Now to the interesting part. Palit is the first manufacturer I have seen who has put every possible connectivity options on their cards. Its fantastic to see actually. This card features good old VGA and DVI. But to add to that it also features HDMI and DRM free Displayport connectivity. This is really nice to see on a enthusiast card.

That tiny little knob you see next to HDMI port is really interesting. It’s a switch to put the card on the backup bios. This is really interesting feature and first on any card I have tested personally. This allowed you to switch to backup bios in case you screw up the original bios while modding the card’s bios or because of any other mishap. So basically you can carry two bios files on 1 card. That’s really neat feature.





The bundle is really disappointing( all it lacks is 1 critical component ). All you get is a instruction leaflet, driver CD, single molex to PCI express power connector and DVI to HDMI converter dongle ( yes, its DVI to HDMI dongle and not the other way around. This is provided just in case you want to connect two monitors which only have DVI ports and cables. This lets you connect the DVI cable to HDMI port on this card ). The 1 critical thing that is missing from this package is the Crossfire bridge. I don’t know why would Palit decide to bundle easily available DVI to HDMI dongle and wouldn’t include very hard to find crossfire bridge ( its really impossible to find here in India ) with this card. I really hope they read this and correct this



Now Lets Void the warrany

[BREAK=Naked Gun]

Naked Gun



Naked Gun



The card is very easy to take apart. The fan assembly and heatsink are two completely different units.







Removing 2 screws from the backplate and 4 screws from the back of the card is all you need to do to take the fans off the heatsink.







Here you can clearly see the 3 heatpipe design up close.







As I said before. Only core is in contact with the base of the heatsink which is all copper.

To expose the core, you need to remove 4 more screws from the back of the card and this reveals the entire naked card.









As I said before, card does not follow the reference design.

The PWM mosfets are covered with the black heatsinks which are attached to the mosfets with thermal tape.







The card is equipped with 1GB Qimonda DDR5 RAM..







And finally the exposed HD4870 core.

That’s it folks, lets move to test setup.





[BREAK=Test Setup & How we tested]

Test Setup



Processor: Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 @ 3.6Ghz

Ram: DDR2 1000 @ 5-5-5-15

Motherboard: Gigabyte X48 DQ6

PSU: Tagan BZ800

HDD: Seagate 7200.11 750GB

Optical Drive: Samsung SH-S223



How we tested.



We are testing the latest DirectX 10 card. This meant we went with the Windows Vista. There is no point in testing this card in Windows XP DirectX 9 environment.



For World In Conflict, we used game’s in built benchmarking utility. For Crysis we used Crysis Benchmark tool 1.0.0.5. Mass Effect, S.T.A.L.K.E.R Clear SKy and GRID does not come with any built in benchmark tool. So for that we used good old FRAPS. Every attempt was made to replicate exact same game play.



We picked the drivers which seemed to work the best on our system. For GTX 260 I settled for 178.15. And got HD4870 512MB and Palit Sonic Dual 1GB, I used Catalyst 8.9RC (beta driver).



The drivers of both the cards were set for maximum quality setting for game testing.

Now let’s have a look at the competition for this card, the card against which GTX 260 will be battling in the market.

This is really a high end gaming card. I restricted benchmarking to higher resolutions for most games and tests which are most popular gaming resolution thanks to 20,22 and 24 inch monitors which dominates the market today.



[BREAK=The Competitors]

The Competitors





We pitted this card against its cheaper cousin HD4870 512MB and GTX 260 from Sapphire and XFX respectively. Bothe cards are 100% reference cards.









Lets begin, shall we?



[BREAK=Mass Effect]

Mass Effect.





This game uses the Unreal Engine 3. This is the reason we dropped the bioshock and UT3 from out benchmark suit. The game graphics and environment feels like trademark UT3 engine game. But the facial expressions and details are extremely accurate and detailed in this game with some stunning graphics effects. The game play does require some time getting used to but overall this game is great benchmark.







The results speak for themselves. This card is indeed faster than old GTX 260 and its 512MB brother as well. Keep in mind that this card is also factory overclocked in addition to 1GB frame buffer. Clear victory for Palit Sonic Dual here.



[BREAK=Race Driver GRID]

Race Driver Grid





One of the new racing game that came out from the Codemasters. Codemasters in past had a reputation of churning out outstanding racing simulation games. Grid is no exception to that. Beautiful game with some great cars and circuits.



This game is very hard to benchmark. There is no built in benchmark system. And races are fully dynamic. So you have to drive through circuit and measure fps using fraps. I tried my best to drive as carefully and uniformly. I drove very carefully for 1 lap of the circuit at the back of the grid with all cars in front of me. All in game settings were maxed out. And 16XAF was enabled. AA was set from the game.







This is one of the games which ATI really dominates. The ATI hardware does not even take much or should I say any performance hit even with AA enabled. Again the Palit Sonic Dual is fastest card here.





[BREAK=World In Conflict]

World In Conflict







World in conflict is one of the best strategy games that came out recently. The graphics and game play both are absolutely stunning, and its one of the games that is really CPU and GPU intensive.



We used game’s in build benchmark system. For this test, the graphics setting were set to very high in the game. This enables DX10 render path and also enables 4x AA.



We even tested cards with 8X AA. For ATI 8X AA was forced from CCC.







In this game, the Palit Sonic Dual is again fastest card and it does have some advantage over GTX 260 and 512MB 4870.





[BREAK=S.T.A.L.K.E.R Clear Sky.]

S.T.A.L.K.E.R Clear Sky





This is the sequel of the Stalker SOC. This game didn’t receive many exceptionally good reviews. But it is really nice game and with DX10 enabled this game really looks great. Specially lighting effects are amazing.

To test this game, I enabled DX10 Enhanced full Dynamic lighting and used maxed out eye candy inside the game. Everything was maxed out except the AA slider which was kept hanging mid way.







As you can see, this game is real GPU killer. Sonic Dual is again fastest card here and barely managed to be playable in DX10 mode. I wouldn’t even bother playing this game on single GPU at anything higher than 1680x1080.





[BREAK=Crysis]



Crysis V1.2







Oh yes, the ever so debated game out there. Many people call it badly coded game, many curse it for being just a technological demonstration. But surely, no review will can ignore or eliminate this game from their gaming tests The game is nemesis of the GPUs.



We used this game to really stress the cards.





This card really shines in Crysis as well. It has noticeable lead over the HD4870 512MB.



[BREAK=3DMark Vantage]

3DMark Vantage







This is the latest 3d benchmark from FutureMark. It’s first DX10 benchmark from FutureMark. A set of synthetic CPU and GPU tests to evaluate system performance. Though it’s synthetic in nature, it is good benchmark for relative comparison.



For 3DMark Vantage, we decided not to force the High Quality settings in NVIDIA CP. It’s a synthetic benchmark. Both ATI and NVIDIA optimize their drivers for 3Dmark. So we set everything to default.







Here the Palit HD4870 Sonic Dual really shines. It’s the first card I have tested that gave more than 9000 GPU score at stock speeds.



[BREAK=Image Quality]



For image quality test, I selected Crysis and GRID.

There is no difference in IQ between HD4870 512 and 1GB versions. These are the same chips.







Observe the hand. In second set of screenshots though difference is not much, observe branches of coconut tree and the cloud.



NVIDIA GTX 260 Screenshot





ATI HD4870 Screenshot





There is some graphical difference between these 2 cards. The clouds do appear more prominent on HD4870 and hand glove rendering is totally different on these cards. I will leave it to you to judge them as many people prefer different things.







In GRID, again difference is not much. Slight variation in rendering of road surface on tyre burn marks.

NVIDIA GTX 260 Screenshot





ATI HD4870 Screenshot





[BREAK=Cooling, Temperatures, Noise and overclock.]

Cooling, Temperatures, Noise and overclock.



The Palit HD4870 1GB Sonic Dual Edition carries 3rd party cooling solution. So how does it really perform?

The answer to that question is “Simply amazing”.



The maximum full load temperature I have seen on this card is 67°C. And this was with my room air conditioner turned off and room temperature looming at 28°C. The cooling solution does its job very nicely.

Coming to overclocking. The card carries 1GB of DDR5 RAM. So I was not expecting anything spectacular clocking from the RAM itself. The card managed to be 100% stable at clock speeds of 845Mhz core and 1140Mhz Memory. This is lower than what I was able to clock my HD4870 512MB variant. But its still good overclock. And even at these clock speeds, the card never even touched 70°C.

The fan speed does change with increase in temperatures. And it starts to spin faster. But this cooling solution was much quieter than the stock cooling solution of HD4870. Overall I must say I was impressed by it.



[BREAK=Final Words]



Final Words



There was never a doubt about how good HD4870 really is. It has proved itself to be incredible value for money card right when 512MB version was launched few months back.

Now the main question that comes in mind is “ Is this card worth spending extra few bucks over HD4870 512 MB?”

The answer to this question is “Absolutely Yes”. If you already have HD4870 512MB, you can still sit tight with that. But if you are purchasing a new card, I would recommend you get this particular HD4870 1GB Sonic Dual edition.

You do get a lot for the money you pay. You get a 1GB frame buffer. ( More the merrier). And a really good cooling solution to go with it which is silent and keeps the card really cool.

The Palit has indeed managed to roll out a really impressive card here. It offers Dual Bios, HDMI, DVI, VGA, Displayport connectivity, really good cooling solution. I cant find any other HD4870 which offers all this.

As I have mentioned, the only missing piece is the Crossfire bridge. I really hope Palit starts bundling this with their cards as this is critical component for those who want to use multiple cards in CrossfireX.

Other than that, this card is almost perfect. It is big YEA for sure.





YEA

• 1GB Framebuffer.

• Impressive cooling solution.

• Amazing connectivity options

• Dual Bios

• Class leading performance.





NAY

• No bundled Crossfire Bridge



Our special thanks to Palit Microsystems Ltd. for sending this card for the review.



Please Digg this review if you like it here : Digg - Palit HD 4870 1GB Sonic Dual Edition Review



And any comments, suggestions are always welcomed.



Shripad signing out until the next time

Just bought the card for 20,750 all inclusive.