THE PALIT RADEON HD 4850 Sonic edition addresses heat issues seen in the usual Radeon HD 4850 cards and also provides an incremental performance boost. It has two heat pipes and a large aluminum heat sink in combination with a rather silent 65mm fan to dissipate the heat that this capable graphics processing unit produces.
Palit has overclocked the core from 625MHz to 685MHz (almost 10 percent higher) but the memory clock sees only a tiny hike from 1,986MHz to 2,000MHz. This Palit scored 7851 3DMark Vantage (Performance) points, over 11 percent higher than the fig¬ured attained by the Asus card using the same Radeon HD 4850 chip, but at stock speeds 6960 points. Performance benefit in actual gaming is a mixed bag - it varies from next to no gain, to an improvement of about 5 percent.



In Company of Heroes, for instance, the overclocked Palit card managed 105fps at 1680 x 1050 resolution and highest quality settings. The Asus was marginally slower at 97fps. F.E.A.R. saw an improvement of 3 percent. Other games like Crysis, World in Conflict and Unreal Tournament III did not see any improvement when tested at similar settings. The Palit card idles at under 50°C while the usual single slot cards based on the same chipset run as hot as 75°C at idle. What's more, you get a minor performance boost as well with this Palit, and the premium you have to pay is not much less than Rs. 1,000.