Introduction

Palit are a new company when it comes to graphic cards, so what are they doing here that others are not? Well with the release of the plain ATI 4870 - Palit have equipped the reference design with a new dual fan cooling system as well as a dual bios which already comes with an overclocked setting to get the most out of the card. So let us get down to business - here are the details direct from Palit themselves:

Radeon™ HD 4870 Sonic Dual Edition equipped with GDDR5 industry lead memory is a revolutionary graphics solution with dual bios and dual fan. This Palit own design graphics solution with world’s first “Smart Switch” technology making overclocking an easy thing; it further equipped with the one and only dual fan cooling system allowing users to turbocharge the speed with no worries about noise and heat!

Palit Radeon™ 4870 is equipped with 512MB/256 bit of GDDR5 memory operating at a blazingly fast 3600MHz and a stunning 725MHz core speed. Palit Radeon™ 4850, with 512MB/256bit of GDDR3 memory operates at 1986MHz and 625MHz core speed. Palit Radeon™ 4800 series products with enhanced anti-aliasing (AA) and anisotropic filtering create striking graphics with unparalleled realism, allowing users to max out the settings of the most demanding games. The latest ATI PowerPlay™ technology is a platform-independent, intelligent power management technology which helps to deliver the power needed to blaze through even the most intense games and to conserve the energy when the demand is low. Redefine HD gaming and go beyond HD video with Palit Radeon™ HD 4800 series products now. Support for DirectX® 10.1 graphics and scaleable ATI CrossFireX™ technology along with further sophisticated new features within ATI Avivo™ HD technology, Palit Radeon™ HD 4800 series products not only allow gamers to play today and prepare for tomorrow, but also provide a truly responsive experience ensuring users can take advantage of the latest display technology.

• Bus interface: PCI Express® 2.0
• Memory Support: 512MB GDDR5
• Memory Interface: 256 bit
• Sonic Memory / Core Clock: 3800MHz (950 x 4) / 750 MHz
• Turbo Memory / Core Clock: 4000MHz (1000 x 4) / 775 MHz
• RAMDACs: 400 MHz
• Full Microsoft® DirectX® 10.1 Shader Model 4.1 support
• Dynamic geometry acceleration
• Game physics processing capability
• ATI PowerPlay™ technology
• ATI CrossFireX™ Multi-GPU Technology
• ATI Avivo™ HD video and display technology
• HDCP capable
• HDMI function via dongle
• Built for Microsoft® Windows Vista™

Features

• Ultra-Threaded Shader Engine
  Support for Microsoft DirectX 10.1 Shader Model 4.0 programmable vertex and pixel shaders in hardware.
• TeraScale Graphics Engine
  The powerful new TeraScale graphics engine features deliver high resolutions and fast frame rates.
• Enhanced Anti-Aliasing & Anisotropic Filtering
  High performance anisotropic filtering and 24x custom filter anti-aliasing (CFAA) smooth jagged edges and create true-to-life graphics, for everything from grass to facial features.
• CrossFireXTM Technology
  Upgrade to even greater 3D performance quickly and easily thanks to plug-and-play ATI CrossFireX technology with up to quad-GPU support.
• PCI Express 2.0 Support:
  Designed to run perfectly with the new PCI Express 2.0 bus architecture. PCI Express 2.0 products are fully backwards compatible with existing PCI Express motherboards for the broadest support.
• Power to Spare
  This GPU has the brute processing power needed for physics, artificial intelligence, stream computing and ray tracing calculations.
• ATI PowerPlay™ Technology
  ATI PowerPlay™ Technology delivers high performance when needed and conserves power when the demand on the graphics processor is low.
• AvivoTM HD Video
  Fully integrated HD audio capabilities and supports playback of multi-channel (5.1) audio streams. Avivo HD enables a one-cable HDMI connectivity solution to high definition home theaters.
• Dual-link DVI Support:
  Able to drive the industry’s largest and highest resolution flat-panel displays up to 2560 x 1600.
  HDMI Capable
• The High-Definition Multimedia Interface (HDMI) is an all-digital audio/video interface capable of transmitting uncompressed streams.
  

Radeon® Series Product Comparison:

System Setup

For this review we're our main review PC running a Intel Quad Q6600 Processor, 4GB Crucial Ballistics Memory, 500 GB Samsung SATA Drive and Windows Vista Service Pack 1. Each benchmark was ran twice to ensure a fair mark and to make sure that every texture was loaded perfectly.

The software we are using is as follows:

• Windows Vista Service Pack 1 RTM

• ATI Catalyst Drivers 8.8

• DirectX 10.1

• 3D Mark 2006

• 3D Mark Vantage

• Crysis

• Call of Duty 4