Palit GeForce GTX 260 Sonic 216 SP 896 MB Review

Name: Palit GeForce GTX 260 Sonic 216 SP 896 MB
Brand: Palit

W1zzard

on Feb 17th, 2009,

in Graphics Cards.

Manufacturer: Palit

(4 Comments) »

Introduction

The NVIDIA GTX 260 has been on the market for quite a while. It was followed by the GTX 260 with 216 shaders to combat ATI's offerings at that time. Now NVIDIA has given permission to their add in board partners to create custom PCB and cooling designs to further diversify their product range.

Palit's GTX 260 Sonic comes in the 216 shader flavor with higher clock speeds out of the box. The cooling system has also been completely revamped to employ Palit's Revolution cooler, yet still uses two slots in your motherboard. What is very uncommon for NVIDIA graphics card is the PCB color which can only be described as ATI red - yes it still looks good. Not only the PCB color has been changed, but large sections of the PCB layout have also been customized, most probably to reduce cost.

	GeForce 9800 GT	Radeon HD 4850	GeForce 9800 GTX	GeForce GTX 260	Radeon HD 4870	Palit GTX 260 Sonic	GeForce GTX 280	Radeon HD 4870 X2	GeForce GTX 285	GeForce GTX 295
Shader units	112	800	128	192	800	216	240	2x 800	240	2x 240
ROPs	16	16	16	28	16	28	32	2x 16	32	2x 28
GPU	G92	RV770	G92	GT200	RV770	GT200	GT200	2x RV770	GT200b	2x GT200b
Transistors	754M	956M	754M	1400M	956M	1400M	1400M	2x 956M	1400M	2x 1400M
Memory Size	512 MB	512 MB	512 MB	896 MB	512 MB	896 MB	1024 MB	2x 1024 MB	1024 MB	2x 896 MB
Memory Bus Width	256 bit	256 bit	256 bit	448 bit	256 bit	448 bit	512 bit	2x 256 bit	512 bit	2x 448 bit
Core Clock	600 MHz	625 MHz	675 MHz	576 MHz	750 MHz	625 MHz	602 MHz	750 MHz	648 MHz	576 MHz
Memory Clock	900 MHz	993 MHz	1100 MHz	999 MHz	900 MHz	1100 MHz	1107 MHz	900 MHz	1242 MHz	999 MHz
Price	$110	$140	$160	$240	$190	$250	$315	$425	$350	$500

Packaging & Contents

Palit has chosen to use a green box with their famous Palit Frog on it. The front of the package clearly communicates all the important specs: the card is a GTX 260, with 216 shaders, 896 MB of memory and clock speeds of 625/1100. Excellent job. On the back you find additional product detail in multiple languages.

You will receive:

Graphics card
Documentation + Driver CD
PCI-E Power Cable
SPDIF audio cable
DVI Adapter + HDMI Adapter
TV Out cables

The Card

Palit's cooling system uses a dual-fan cooler that seems to be a custom design for Palit. As mentioned before, the card uses two cooling slots in your system.

The card has two DVI ports, which is the standard output configuration nowadays. In case you need an analog VGA output, you can use a DVI adapter (included). In case you want to connect your big digital TV screen, you can use the included HDMI adapter. The HDCP output features the usual HDCP+Audio, which allows easy setup of a media PC. For HDMI Audio, NVIDIA requires you to feed an external audio source, for example from your motherboard's on-board audio, to the card via SPDIF cable (also included). AMD on the other hand has integrated a sound device inside their GPUs which is the easier solution for most users.

Here are the front and the back of the cards, high-res versions are also available (front, back). If you choose to use these images for voltmods etc, please include a link back to this site or let us post your article.

A Closer Look

The cooling assembly is made of several parts. First you remove the plastic top cooler which houses the dual fans. Please note here that both fans are connected to the same cable which means they are both temperature controlled but always running at the same speed.

Directly below the fans you will find a large heatpipe based heatsink module. It uses three heatpipes and a large number of fins to move heat away from the GPU quickly, no other components are cooled by that part of the cooling system. Further to the back you will find a small black heatsink that is responsible for cooling the power regulation circuitry.

Once the heatpipe heatsink is removed, another piece of metal can be found on the rest of the card. It overs all the other components that need some form of cooling, like the memory chips, the NVIO chip and the memory voltage regulators.

You may combine two or more of these cards to build an SLI rig for even higher performance or image quality settings.

The card has two six-pin power connectors, both are required for operation of the card. Further to the right on the picture is the white input for the SPDIF audio to be streamed into the HDMI output.

The GDDR3 memory chips are made by Samsung and carry the model number K4J52324QH-HJ08. With a latency of 0.8 ns, they are specified to run at 1250 MHz.

Unlike the NVIDIA reference design which uses a Volterra voltage regulator, Palit has chosen to go with a Realtek design which is probably a lot cheaper. Unfortunately this means that there is no software voltage control possible because the controller chip has no I2C interface which is required for communication with the host PC.