Review Palit HD4850 Sonic AMD Radeon HD 4850 Graphics card

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In June, we reviewed two ATi HD4850 cards, one from ASUS and the other from PowerColor. Although the HD 4850 received well acclaimed reviews for it's price/performance, the ref HD4850 suffered from a poor fanning solution and it gets too hot, registering a 77 deg Celsius even on idle. Many solutions popped up on the net, including modifying the fan, circuitry, firmware to spin up the fan.



In order to solve all these problems, Palit came out with a custom designed Radeon HD4850. Based on the RV770 GPU, this card comes with 256 bits memory width with Samsung 1.0ns GDDR3 (512MB). It supports DX10.1 and SM 4.1. The HDMI comes with 7.1 HD audio and it supports advance PowerPlay. Although the original ATi ref card clocks at 625/993, the Palit HD4850 Sonic comes preclocked at 685/1000MHz. Palit redesign the power circuitry and replaced it with a 3 phase PWM. In addition, it uses a 8pin power connector. It is able to support up to 150W; sufficient power enables overclocking potential with stability.

The card also uses a dual slot design with copper heatpipe. Palit HD 4850 Sonic comes with Palit's innovative cooling system with two-ball bearing PWM fan, heat-pipes, and superior copper base to ensure high performance, consistent thermal effect but still generates less noise. This unique cooling design helps the graphics card to dissipate the heat efficiently, both for the components and the memories, the GPU temperature is up to 20deg lower than the original fan and the cooling system is 10dB quieter even at full loading situation

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