Palit HD4850 Sonic

Justin Robinson half expects this card to transform into Soundwave...

When we opened the packaging to this card, we half-expected one of our favourite Transformers to leap out and begin wreaking delicious Decepticon destruction on our Labs. While this may have happened only in our minds, what we did get out of the box was something rather cool anyway.

We’ve taken a liking to the RV770 PRO core that runs in this card, in this case with a core frequency that’s been overclocked by a rather insane 60MHz up from stock – for a factory overclocked card this is very good. Memory speeds haven’t increased by much, with only a small bump up over the stock 993MHz, but this still affords the card more than enough bandwidth to get information to the 512MB of GDDR3 memory available.

But the real drawcard of the Sonic isn’t the tender graphical guts inside, but instead the cooler. This is a dual-heatpiped, large-fanned cooler, with a large amount of aluminium fins to dissipate the heat away from this warm-running card. The air from the central fan is guided over these fins by a smoky black plastic guide that only adds to the card’s visual appeal. Unfortunately this cooler doesn’t touch the memory at all, though there is airflow directed at it.

The cooler does an admirable job of keeping temperatures controlled as well, idling at 46 degrees and hitting a load of 64 (in Issue 92 we recorded an idle of 61 and load of 82, so this is a huge improvement). Sound levels remained quite low too, with 48.9dBA idle and 51dBA load betraying the Sonic’s name; this is great for anyone who loves a quiet computer while watching movies, or playing games.

And if you do decide to play games, this card has you covered. Crysis provides some good stable framerates, and CoH is also solid, though there is a strange dip down in performance – most likely due to driver issues. Our 3DMark benchies were also quite impressive, with solid scores that you could easily push higher again with a bit of tweaking, and even at default clocks this card pulls in with an extra 700 3DMark06 points.

One of the features of this card (that you may have noticed already if you read the ‘Specifications’ at the top of the review) is that it comes with an 8-pin connector instead of the usual 6-pin. This was done to increase stability when overclocking, though we haven’t tested it properly yet. The good news is that those with power supplies that don’t have one of these connectors can use the included adaptor to give an extra two pins to the card.

The bundle is rather light, with that cable, two DVI adaptors (one HDMI, one VGA) and a driver disc. No game is included with this card.

For a factory-overclocked, aftermarket-heatsinked well-performing card, this is a very solid choice that won’t break your budget.