Another day, another GeForce 8800 GT, this time it comes in the form of a Palit offering. The good news is it's a bit more interesting than your standard run of the mill GeForce 8800 GT which we have all become so accustom to now. Palit has decided to mix it up this time around with a new heatsink and fan combination, and we've got to say that it's about time we saw something other than the loud, hot, boring, single slot cooler that we have seen from most other manufacturers over the past few weeks. Palit do a good job of impressing us here, they seem to be consistently one of the cheapest partners on the market but it doesn't seem to come at the cost of downgrading or build quality. - TweakTown

Palit GeForce 8800 GT 512MB Sonic Version Review

Ahhh, Frobot. You've got to love the cool green frog in his robot suit. Like all high-end models from Palit, instead of opting for the standard flat color they use the funky reflective type and as usual being an NVIDIA card it follows with a green box. The front of the box gives us the standard run down as usual, we can see the brand across the top left corner along with the top right corner giving us the standard run down of Vista certification, NVIDIA chipset and of course HDCP ready. The bottom left corner shows us that a copy of Tomb Raider Anniversary is included in the package with some extra details.

Turning the box over, we have some more technical information in a multitude of languages. Across the bottom we also have some more logos along with the Palit website and e-mail address. The package is pretty standard for a Palit card, everything you need to get up and running without any real drama along with the inclusion of a full version game. In this case we also have a DVI to HDMI connector which is nice. With the package out the way it's time to move onto the card and straight away we can see the inclusion of the new cooler that Palit has decided to use, which is certainly not a standard cooling solution.

Using a blue colored aluminum, the cooler feels excellent and is up to the normal high grade that we have become accustom to from Palit. Due to the design not covering the whole card, Palit have also placed a heatsink towards the back right of the card to cover some of the hotter components. We can also see the plate in the background that covers the memory which is nice. It is so often that we see companies just chuck a heatsink on the core and not worry about any of the other components. As you would expect, we have the standard PCI Express power connector which is a lot more visible this time around.

What we can also see here is that the card is now a dual slot one as opposed to all the other GeForce 8800 GT cards we have seen which use the standard single slot heatsink. Like we had mentioned earlier, this particular card carries the Sonic name which tells us hat it comes pre-overclocked out of the box. Palit hasn't gone too crazy with the speeds and has chosen to simply bump the core up to 650MHz over the standard 600MHz, with the memory moving up to 1900MHz over the standard 1800MHz effective. The shader clock has also taken an increase due to the core going up which moves it from 1500MHz to 1650MHz.

Palit has done an excellent job with the GeForce 8800GT, and when it came to doing a bit of overclocking we managed to get past 740MHz and 2000MHz effective on the memory. What this helped us get was performance above the new G92 based GeForce 8800 GTS. There is a lot we like about this card. For starters the fact that it's pre-overclocked is always a nice thing. The aftermarket cooler is simply bliss, the noise and temperature on the stock one is just horrible and it's great to see something better. Sure it manages to take up two slots but it's not really a drama.

The fact that Palit has also managed to include a full version game and keep price quite competitive is also another good thing. All in all, the card just has a lot going for it and it's one of the best GeForce 8800 GT cards that we have seen to date. No doubt there are going to be a number of people having a hunt for this particular card. Palit haven't disappointed again, and we'll be keeping an eye out for what they do with the new G92 based GeForce 8800 GTS 512MB edition.