cantstraferight [Insert funny here]
Joined: Jan 16, 2007
Posts: 1410
Post Subject: HD4850 Sonic
Posted on: Nov 4, 2008
Whats in the box
Inside the box you will find the a lot of empty space and and a smaller box that contains the card itself, which is a shock as the box would lead you to believe that the card is massive where as in reality its just the size of a normal graphics card with a slightly larger than average heatsink.
Under the smaller box you will find a dvi to hdmi adapter, a dvi to vga adapter, a 6 pin to 8 pin pci-e power adapter, an ATI driver disc and a small leaflet explaining how to install the drivers.
Specs
* Bus interface: PCI Express® 2.0
* Memory Support: 512MB GDDR3
* Memory Interface: 256 bit
* Memory Clock: 2000MHz (1000 x 2)
* Core Clock: 685MHz
* RAMDACs: 400 MHz
* Full Microsoft® DirectX® 10.1 Shader Model 4.1 support
* Dual Dual-link DVI outputs support 2560x1600 resolution displays
* 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 (Optional)
* Built for Microsoft® Windows Vista™
Looking at the specs there are a few improvement to the stock HD4850 specifactions like the core clock speed is increased from the standard from 625Mhz up to 685Mhz and the memory speed has been bumped up form 1986Mhz to 2000Mhz. The HD4850 Sonic also has an had an upgrade to the heatsink. The heatsink on the Sonic has 2 heat pipes with aluminuam fins cools by a 70mm variable speed fan. the custom cooler takes up the slot next to the card so the support bracket includes holes to pull air in through that slot. Overall the custom cooler is a great improvement over the stock cooler thats included with the standard HD4850. Not only does it cool better allowing you to overclock the card tougher than the stock card but its also much more quieter than the stock cooler. Palit not only have overclocked the card and added a custom cooler but also spent time rearranging and improving the PCB. I have to say, its nice to see companies go to this kind of extent their products.
Benchmarks
The test pc consisted of
Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 (3Ghz)
2Gb of ddr2 ram
Windows XP with Direct X 9
Overclock
Im not in a overclocker and the card does come pre overclocked but I felt I should see if there was headroom for futher over clocking or if the card had been pushed as far as it would go. Using the ATI finetune tool to determine what was safe to over clock to I set the core clock to 725mhz and the memory speed to 2080Mhz (effectively).
This small overclock pushed the 3D mark score up 250 points, to a total of 12384 in the real world this meant an extra 2-3 frame per second in Crysis. while overclocked the temprature of the core was only 2-3 degrees Celsius higher then the un-overrclock temperatures which leads me to believe that it could be pushed even futher if you added some better cooling to the case and overclocked it yourself. With a bit of work you some users have been able to push the clock up to 755Mhz and the memory up to 2210Mhz allowing a much bigger boast in performance.
Conclusion
If you were considering picking up a HD4850 your better off spending a little more and getting the Palit HD4850 Sonic. but if your budget streches a little thougher there are cards that are just a little more but will give you more performance.
