Palit Radeon HD 4870 Sonic Dual Edition Review --- TheThirdMedia Hardware

Turbo-charged for Greater Performance

As soon as we received our first overclocked Radeon HD 4870, the recently reviewed PowerColor PCS+ HD 4870 1GB Radeon, we knew that it was always going to be a matter of time before more overclocked variants started popping up. Fresh in our labs then is the Palit Radeon HD 4870 Sonic Dual Edition (quite a mouthful, we know). Boasting a cooler that can only be described as monstrous, the Palit Radeon HD 4870 Sonic Dual Edition claims, like such cards usually do, to offer improved performance and cooler, quieter operation.

The Palit Radeon HD 4870 Sonic Dual Edition comes in a large dark red box, featuring Palit's mascot, Frobo the frog. It's almost impossible to miss.

Now Palit is not trying to sound flashy with the card's long name. It does mean something, so allow us to explain. "Sonic" indicates that this particular card belongs to Palit's rather popular series of overclocked cards, while "Dual Edition", on the other hand, refers to the card's dual bios, which allows it to either boot in "Sonic" or "Turbo" mode (more on this Dual Bios later).

So before we get into details about this card, let us first take a look at how the card stacks up against other comparable cards.

Palit Radeon HD 4870 Sonic Dual Edition and comparable competitive cards
HD4870

Model	PalitRadeon HD 4870 Sonic Dual Edition 512MB	RadeonHD 4870 512MB	RadeonHD 4850 512MB	NVIDIAGTX 280 1GB	NVIDIAGTX 260 896MB
CoreCode	RV700	RV770	RV770	GT200	GT200
TransistorCount	956million	956million	956million	1400million	1400million
ManufacturingProcess	55nm	55nm	55nm	65nm	65nm
CoreClock	750/775MHz	750MHz	625MHz	602MHz	576MHz
StreamProcessors	160Processors (800 Stream processing units)	160Processors (800Stream processing units)	160Processors (800Stream processing units)	240Stream Processors	192Stream Processors
StreamProcessor Clock	750/775MHz	750MHz	625MHz	1296MHz	1242MHz
TextureMapping Units (TMU) or Texture Filtering (TF)units	40	40	40	80	64
RasterOperator units (ROP)	16	16	16	32	28
MemoryClock	3800/4000MHz GDDR5	3600MHzGDDR5	2000MHzGDDR3	2214MHzGDDR3	1998MHzGDDR3
DDRMemory Bus Width	256-bit	256-bit	256-bit	512-bit	448-bit
MemoryBandwidth	121.6/128GB/s	115.2GB/s	64GB/s	141.7GB/s	111.9GB/s
PCIExpress Interface	PCIever 2.0 x16	PCIever 2.0 x16	PCIever 2.0 x16	PCIever 2.0 x16	PCIever 2.0 x16
MolexPower Connectors	2 x6-pin	2 x6-pin	6-pin	6-pin,8-pin	2 x6-pin
MultiGPU Technology	CrossFireX	CrossFireX	CrossFireX	SLI	SLI
DVIOutput Support	2 xDual-Link, 1 x DisplayPort	2 xDual-Link	2 xDual-Link	2 xDual-Link	2 xDual-Link
HDCPOutput Support	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
StreetPrice	US$269	US$299	US$199	US$499	US$299



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