Palit HD 4870 Sonic Dual Edition 512 MB

A Closer Look

Palit uses a two piece cooler. When the top cooling assembly with the fan is removed, one big heatsink remains which looks very much like a Thermalright product.


The aluminum cooler uses three heatpipes that move the heat away from the core quickly to be dissipated in the fins.


The fan assembly has two fans, one 70 mm and one 80 mm, that move heat away from the heatsink.


Palit has re-designed the voltage regulator and uses a different voltage regulator chip as well. They have chosen to go with four phases which definitely helps keep the voltage regulators cooler. A big black heatsink cools the chips which sit right in the airflow created by one of the fans.


Unfortunately the memory chips are not cooled at all, but still we could run the memory at 1100 MHz GDDR5.


Palit supports CrossFire and CrossFireX for up to four graphics card rendering together to improve framerate and quality.


A dual six pin power connector supplies the required juice for the card. Palit has changed its location in their board design. It is now located on the long side of the PCB which makes it easier to reach than the original location on the reference design.


Just like on the regular HD 4870, the GDDR5 memory chips are made by Qimonda - the X2 uses chips from Hynix. The 40X in the name stands for the data rate of 4.0 Gbps per pin. Effectively this means that chips are rated at 1000 MHz real clock. Please note that GDDR5 offers twice the bandwidth per pin at the same clock than GDDR3/4. So a 256-bit GDDR5 card has the same bandwidth as a 512-bit GDDR3 card at the same clock.


The RV770 graphics processor is made by TSMC Taiwan in a 55 nm process.