When everyone thought AMD was sinking into a dark abyss, ATI unveiled their Radeon HD 4800 series and proved the critics all wrong. The Radeon HD 4870 is their current single GPU flagship, and it's earned a high level of well deserved distinction. Palit has followed-up this pattern by adding some stand-out features of their own. We will look at the Palit Radeon HD 4870 Sonic edition card from Palit. This RV770 graphics solution offers factory overclocked performance and a new cooling solution. Tao Le Ching had it right, the more you know, the less you understand. This notion surrounds the computer hardware industry as much as anything as the industry changes in a new direction. - Benchmark Reviews

Palit Radeon HD 4870 Sonic Dual Edition Card Review

We live in a world where a company that produces the most powerful video card available is usually regarded as the leader in graphics technology. There is a certain amount of truth to this to be fair, but it's not always good to be the king. We imagine NVIDIA has to be getting a little tired of constantly polishing the throne in a lonely palace, and especially after their recent launch of the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 280 offered just as much to gamers as it did to multimedia editors. But what happens to everyone else who doesn't have enough gold to buy a piece of the kingdom? The Radeon HD 4800 series is what happens.

ATI originally designed the Radeon HD 4870 with a balanced blend of value and performance, and Palit re-issues the Radeon HD 4870 with an added dose to both. The Sonic Dual edition Radeon HD 4870 video card improves on ATI's latest and greatest single chip graphics card by adding some much needed cooling improvements and a collection of rather small performance tweaks. Featuring the industries first implementation of GDDR5 video frame buffer memory, and the overclocked RV770 graphics processor is allowed to breathe fire without the worry of burning up video memory and running the card a bit cooler as default.

There's no denying that Palit has improved the cooling design of the reference Radeon HD 4870. As we learned previously of the Sapphire Radeon HD 4870, this is one extremely warm blooded video card. Palit offers two fans to cool their Sonic Dual edition card, a 2-pin 70mm fan which draws constant power from the PCB and runs full time, and a 4-pin speed controlled 80mm fan which receives thermal feedback from the GPU. And a look at the Sonic Dual edition video card from the side reveals that there very little mass beneath the fans. The reference version of this graphics card is weighed down by a large heatsink and single fan.

In conclusion, our final recommendation on the Palit Radeon HD 4870 Sonic Dual edition is very good but not so great that you should ignore the options. On its own accord, the Radeon HD 4870 version would occasionally reach the level of performance seen from the GeForce GTX 260 but never actually dominated over it. Taken into consideration, you have to look at price and sub-feature offerings. It's no surprise that CrossFire and CrossFireX are available on just about every single motherboard that fits an Intel or AMD processor. The same is hardly true for the SLI really. So then it's down to price and personal choice.

Since NVIDIA submitted to ATI's price point, both the GeForce GTX 260 and Radeon HD 4870 are now offered around the same cost. At the end of this point there's really no decisive victory to be handed out. In summary, the Palit Radeon HD 4870 is an outstanding product with a few convenience features over the alternative, so the decision is going to come down to personal preference and available pricing.