Palit HD4850 Sonic is the card that we looked at and have seen the difference in design as compared to the other cards available on the market. In terms of performance, it has overtaken the two other 4850 cards we tested before.

We tested the card on a ASRock X48 board just like the two other HD 4850 cards. One thing we noticed is the cooler temperatures on idle. Using the GPU-Z, we can see that the temperature was at 52 deg Celsius and fan speed was a 6% running at 707 RPM. This is definitely way better than the ref. designed registering a high temperature of 78 Deg Celsius on idle.

Using the Furmark, we ran the test for almost 5 minutes and the temperature climbed up to 82 Deg Celsius. On previous 4850 cards, we see the temperature of the GPU climbed from at 76 Deg Celsius all the way up to 105 Deg Celsius. Palit's HD4850 Sonic does keep the maximum temperature down by almost 20 Degrees Celsius.

For overclocking, we managed to overclock it using Rivatuner at 700/1100. The following results are recorded.

We tried to o/c it higher but it seems that the Core doesn't really like anything beyond 700MHz. Perhaps a voltage mod is required to push it higher.

Package wise, Palit has room for improvement. In fact, most of the ATi cards do not come software bundle like temperature monitoring or fan speed control software.

In terms of technology, the 4800 series supports the DX10.1 and SM 4.1 for gaming. If you intend to use the card as to decode AVC/H.264, you can use the it's DVI-HDMI converter and channel the 7.1 surround audio and video directly to your HDTV without relaying cabling within your casing.

In conclusion, if you are looking for a quiet and cool HD 4850 card, the Palit HD4850 Sonic is worth the consideration.

Price ~ 200-230 USD (Click the icons on the top and bottom of the page)

Pros

• Low CPU utilisation when playing back Blu-Ray
• Supports  DX10.1 & SM4.1
• CrossFire X support

Cons

• No games included
• Rely on third party tools to adjust fan speed

Ratings

Here are my ratings out of 10 stars.