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Power

To measure power usage, we used a Kill A Watt P4400 power meter. Note that the above numbers represent the power drain for the entire benchmarking system, not just the video cards themselves. For the 'idle' readings we measured the power drain from the desktop, with no applications running; for the 'load' situation, we took readings during a demanding part of 3DMark06.)

As with other HD 4870 cards, the Palit HD4870 Sonic requires two six-pin power connectors.

It's to Palit's credit that this HD 4870 Sonic uses less power at peak loads than the stock HD 4870, while being faster at the same time.

Get into the game... or go the distance?

To sum up this review, let's look at this from two angles: first question is whether to go with a HD 4870 over some other class of card; the second question is whether to choose this particular HD 4870.

The answer to the first question is this: if your a more than a casual gamer, I would say to really get into gaming at a 'high' level of performance, your ticket to ride is the HD 4850. With a HD 4850 you are ready to rock.

But if you are looking for something better -- say you want to travel executive class on the game bus, then you are going to look for the next step up. The next step up is the HD 4870. You can see the performance gap in the graphs yourself -- the HD 4870 offers up to a 30% more performance, roughly for about 30% more than the HD 4850. This is a good deal -- in many previous generations, the closest you wanted to get to top GPU performance, the much steeper the price -- you would end up paying 50% more for a 20% gain, say.

The equivalent of getting your own private jet is the HD 4870X2. If you were wondering why I didn't mention any NVIDIA options -- well, the fact of the matter is that the ATI 'owns' the high-end right now. The GTX 280 does not stack up very well against the HD 4870 unless you aren't considering price at all. 

On to the next question: is the Palit HD 4870 Sonic a card to get if you are going to get a HD 4870? Sure, the fan was a bit on the loud side; a few marks can be taken off for that. No CrossFire bridge? Sigh... And the turbo switch is sort of a gimmick -- but on the other hand, it has a practical side, because it allows you the safety net of being able to scramble a BIOS without killing your video card, so I can't take marks off for that.

Then this is where I usually say "Well, you have to look at the charts, and see if paying the premium for this overclocked card is worth the extra money." But I can't say this, this time around, and this is important -- after checking four online retailers, it appears that this card is selling at the same price of many 'standard' HD 4870s, and selling for less than many other overclocked HD4870 models. Because of this -- well, the Palit HD 4870 Sonic is a just plain superior choice for a HD 4870. With the Palit HD4870 Sonic you are getting a better built, faster HD 4870 with a two year warranty, all without paying any sort of extra price over a regular HD 4870.

For anyone besides those who are really sensitive to fan noise, this is the HD4870 to get.