Having already taken a crowbar to prices like a spree killing yellow man, these Radeon HD 4870's refresh seems overdue. The board, stonkin' as it is, has an annoying stock heatsink and a lot of untapped overclocking potential. There's a short list of non stock, factory overclocked Radeon HD 4870 cards that need reviewing. First on our list is Palit's Radeon HD 4870 Sonic Dual edition. With its long heatsink and large fans, not to mention namesake, the thing promises quiet and at the flick of a switch for overclocking. Which is as such a nice feature, though only if it would do the actual overclocking on the fly. Not everything stood up to scrutiny. At least it's still inexpensive, which is great. - TechLounge

Palit Radeon HD 4870 512MB Sonic Dual Card Review

The board layout, under the heatsink, is appropriately rearranged. The two 6-pin power connections are rotated 90 degrees, pointing up from the top of the card, not away for better airflow around the power regulation hardware, which has a small dedicated heatsink through the main heatsink. These fans aren't identical. Also, the card doesn't exhaust out the back of the case with the trade-off being connectivity. In addition to the twin DVI connectors, which are HDMI ready via adapter, there's a DisplayPort connector and an innocuous overclocking switch. It's not a cool knife switch, which would have propelled it to must have status.

The rest of the card is boilerplate. Of course, the card is CrossFireX ready, with the standard two CrossFire tabs at the top. The back of the card is naked, sans heatspreader like other Radeon HD 4870's. Depending on who you ask, their overclocking setting put the GPU at 775MHz and the memory at 4000MHz, but even with multiple switch flips and some reboots, it still reported the speeds at 750/3800MHz, which means that only the memory is overclocked. But we didn't let that stop us. This card did not too shabbily, hitting 815MHz on the core and 4240MHz on the memory, which is certainly a nice increase.

Because the card is priced identically to other stock Radeon HD 4870's, it's hard not to recommend it, but that doesn't mean it's any better. Palit offers a decent warranty and some class leading performance, but aside from the DisplayPort connector, the features don't pan out evenly, and we're not just talking about the dual BIOS issue, which may have been a fluke. Cutting right to it, the heatsink isn't quiet. It's cool, and it overclocks well, but the only way to make it less noisy is to replace it. Which seeing how it's got a heatsink readily fitted for the power regulation bits, it's a prime candidate for Zalman's ever present modification.

It does make less noise than the stock heatsink, but it's a different quality of it, and we find it more off putting. And the lack of exhaust could be a deal breaker, particularly with compact builds. We are not impressed with this card, but that doesn't mean we are saying it's bad. Because of the price, we're going to point everyone in its direction, but if you're looking for that perfect Radeon HD 4870, overclocked and quiet and good looking, don't dawdle here. It's, at the very least, a step sideways, and to each his own.