The Palit Radeon HD 4870 Sonic Dual Edition is equipped with 512MB of GDDR5 memory and comes packed with innovative features like a dual bios and dual cooling fans. Palit custom designed this graphics card from the ground up, so no even the PCB is reference designed. Read on to see what Palit changed and how it performs with all the changes!
Anyone can slap on an aftermarket heatsink and call it a day but Palit's implementation of two BIOS chips on this video card was a welcome improvement. I am notorious for killing video cards and I've had my fair share of video cards that I've bricked from bad BIOS flashes so having two BIOS chips on the card doesn't immediately render it useless after a bad flash. Palit features two BIOS profiles, one with stock clocks and one slightly overclocked. The stock clocks are 750MHz on the core and 950MHz on the memory. Palit bumps this up to 775MHz on the core and 1000MHz on the memory for a modest and safe overclock.
Not bad. Looks like it's definitely worth the small price difference for a quieter, cooler, more user friendly 4870. Too bad I got one before all the after-market coolers started showing up. Oh well, still a nice card.
The cooler on this card rocks. I simply like having this card not bake at 80 Celsius at idle and push triple digits under load like the reference cards/cooler. I also liked the dual BIOS feature as during the review I was trying to flash the card with a different BIOS and ended up bricking* it. After 30 seconds of freaking out I simply flicked the BIOS switch and was back up and running to finish the review. I ended up voltmodding(~1.25vGPU stock, walls at 805MHz) the card in preparation for another review and it's happily doing 875MHz on the core with load temps around 80 Celsius, still cooler than the idle of my previous HD4870
*- flashed with a 64KB bios instead of the full 128KB with the GDDR5 code. BIOS is bricked and unrecoverable
The problem with the bizarre clock numbers shown by GPU-Z for 48XX ATI cards have been corrected (at least for my dual 4850s) with version 0.28.GPU-Z matches the Catalyst numbers.
I had no problem with the power connectors located where they were. They are mounted just like the GTX280 and I had no problems mounting that in a case so I imagine this card would be just the same.
