Palit expands the Sonic line-up of overclocked graphics card, with an HD 4850 sporting a 685MHz core and some aftermarket cooling.
Straight from the word go the HD 4850 has impressed us. Its competitive launch price and performance that put it in the same category as cards that were $100 or $150 more expensive, meant that it looked like it was going to take the crown as the best-value graphics card on the market. Like every product, however, nothing is perfect. The single slot cooler, while looking great and being incredibly handy, didn’t do wonders for core temperatures, making it one of the hottest cards we’ve seen in a long time.
But it was only a matter of time until we saw companies do something about it. Palit was one of the first to do so, and they also took the time to overclock the card to give us even more bang for our buck. Moving from a stock 625MHz to 685MHz we should see a nice bump in performance, while the memory has been evened out from 993MHz to 1000MHz, giving us a nice round 2000MHz DDR memory clock.
One of the bigger features of the card is, of course, the cooler. In the process of making the card cooler Palit has had to take up a second slot in your computer. The good news is that the cooler is a new design, and different to the gold round one we’ve been seeing for a while now.
What all these little tweaks equate to is a card that runs faster and cooler than a reference-based one, while costing only slightly more thanks to Palit's aggressive pricing structure. While the overclock is handy as always, it doesn’t really make too much difference to our gaming experience. It’s not really high enough to move from no AA to turning AA on, or moving all details from high to very high. However, it does help to keep our minimum frame rate above that much-needed 30 FPS barrier.
While the extra FPS is indeed handy, the biggest benefit about the card is the aftermarket cooling option. While our reference cooler puts the back of the card at a very warm 65ºC (a temperature that is generally reserved for passive cooled cards) the aftermarket cooler from Palit helps keeps temps at a much more reasonable 50.3ºC, which just generally makes us feel a lot more comfortable.
The other important aspect of aftermarket cooling is, of course, how many more dBs the lower temperatures cost us. The good news is, compared to the stock model, the noise difference between the two is roughly a dB at idle and load.
Just as with anything, the cooler running card has come at a cost, and that is moving away from a single slot design to a dual slot one. For the most part this isn’t going to be too much of an issue, as most motherboards are designed so that if you do use a dual slot card you still have as many handy expansion ports possible.
If you find yourself looking for an HD 4850 but don’t want to deal with the worrying temperatures that the reference card offers, the Palit HD 4850 Sonic is an excellent choice. Throw in the fact that you’re going to get an extra few FPS here and there for only a little bit more, and there isn’t a whole lot wrong with the card. However, it would have been nice to see Palit increase the memory clock more than 14MHz DDR to something a little higher, like 2100/2200MHz, as we’ve seen from some other companies already.