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Palit Radeon 4870 Sonic Dual Edition CrossfireX
| Author: | Chris Swertfeger |
| Date: | 2008.11.09 |
| Topic: | Audio |
| Provider: | Palit |
| Manufacturer: | http://www.palit.biz/main/index.php?lang=us |
| Author: | Chris Swertfeger |
| Date: | 2008.11.09 |
| Topic: | Audio |
| Provider: | Palit |
| Manufacturer: | http://www.palit.biz/main/index.php?lang=us |
The bionic frog is back again, only this time with a few tricks up his metallic sleeve. This new version of our Kermit commando features dual BIOS, which enables the smart switch to shift between sonic and turbo speeds. Also onboard are dual DVI heads, HDMI and a DisplayPort. We take not one, but two of these bad boys out for a spin in a CrossfireX setup and tell you whether or not the smart switch is worth your time. Read on to find out whether or not this card has what it takes to leap forward to crush the competition.
The Radeon HD 4870 Sonic Dual Edition equipped with GDDR5 industry lead memory is a revolutionary graphics solution with dual bios and dual fans. This Palit own design graphics solution with world’s first “Smart Switch” technology making overclocking an easy thing; it is further equipped with the one and only dual fan cooling system allowing users to turbo charge their speed with no worries about noise and heat!
- Plait
The Palit Radeon 4870 Sonic Dual Edition comes packaged in a nice eye catching box featuring their bionic frog, or frobot as they like to call it. I like the fact that they don't plaster their logo everywhere, like most companies, and fill up the remaining space with logos of certifications. Palit keeps it nice, simple, and artsy. They only have a few logos and show a very nice graphic of their mascot.
Double the cards, double the fun! |
Back of the box |
Sonic Speed |
Proof of purchase, or review....? |
Inside the box is a cardboard compartment that flips open to reveal the prize. The card comes wrapped in a nice bubble wrap pouch. Everyone loves bubble wrap! Although in this instance, an anti-static bag would have been preferable.
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The card comes boxed with a driver disk, quick start guide, DVI to D-sub adapter, DVI to HDMI adapter and a two 4-pin molex to 6-pin adapter.
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Taking a closer look at the Palit Radeon 4870 Sonic Dual Edition, we see that it has a few features that set it apart from the rest. This card is a beast, taking up two pci slots. This is to accommodate the large heatsink, dual fans, and heatpipes that this card has attached to it. The color that they used on the card would not be my first design choice. The solid orange color makes it look kind of cheap and plastic like.
You will notice that the faceplate does not have any vents on it. I felt this was a rather poor engineering decision, as the fans are forced to blow the hot air back into the case. This means you need to make sure you have a good cooling system before you invest in one of these monsters, as they do put out a bit of heat.
The "Smart Switch" brings back nostalgic memories of one of my first computers and how it had a turbo button on the front to give it that extra boost. In this instance, the switch allows the card to switch between BIOSes to safely overclock the card. In the normal position, the card has a core clock of 750 MHz and a Memory clock of 950 MHz (which is still higher than the stock 4870 specification of 900 MHz). When in the turbo mode the card switches to the other BIOS and has a core clock of 775 MHz and Memory clock of 1000 MHz.
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GPU-Z is a program very similar to CPU-Z that gives detailed information about your graphics card.
This programs gives some nice tech specs about the card. I had it in the overclocked mode when this was taken.
Devil May Cry 4 is the fourth installment of the Devil May Cry series. In the game, the player controls both Nero, and Dante, the game's protagonist and the series' title character respectively and fights enemies in close combat using firearms, swords, and other weapons. The characters Lady and Trish from previous games in the series make appearances, along with new characters Nero, Kyrie, Credo, Gloria, and Agnus. The game is set after Devil May Cry and before Devil May Cry 2.
For Benchmarking Devil May Cry 4, I used the game's built in performance test with maxed out settings to determine the average frame rate. The built in performance test goes through 4 different scenes featuring different aspects of the game.
The turbo switch didn't seem to make much of a difference in Devil May Cry. At times the normal clocked card outperformed the turbo clocked one. The total difference during gameplay would probably be un noticeable. The addition of a second card however, made a considerable difference. The game scaled rather nicely with the addition of another card.
Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare is a first-person shooter video game developed by Infinity Ward and published by Activision. It is the fourth installment of the Call of Duty video game series, but the game now breaks away from the World War II setting of previous games and is instead set in modern times. The story is centered around a fictional near-future conflict involving the United States, the United Kingdom, and Russia, who are fighting against Russian ultranationalists in civil war torn Russia, and rebels that have staged a government overthrow in a small Middle Eastern country.
To benchmark Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare we created a custom time demo of actual multiplayer gameplay. We use the built-in time demo functionality to play and stop the time demo. To record the actual frames per seconds achieved by the game, we used FRAPS.
The game did scale with the addition of another card, but didn't scale as much as I had hoped. This is possibly due to driver issues with the card. The "Smart Switch" only provided a max difference of about 2 FPS, which would not be noticeable.
Crysis, a science fiction first person shooter set in the year 2020. You play as Lieutenant Jack Dunn, codename "Nomad", a United States Army Delta Force operative. The game starts out with a group of archaeologists doing research on an island in the South China Sea. As they were doing their research, minding their own business, they suddenly became overrun and taken captive by the North Korean Army. This is when the US Delta Forces were deployed to rescue the scientists. As the game goes on, you soon find out that the North Koreans are not the only threat on this island. Crysis, released towards the end of 2007, uses DirectX 10 and is currently the most demanding game out there.
For testing Crysis, we are going to be using a third party program very similar to FRAPS. This program is called "Benchmarking Tool for Crysis". With this we can tell it to render the time demo multiple times and then generate a word file once completed with the results from every test. You can easily change game settings and how the benchmark will be performed.
For testing purposes we are going to be using the latest version of the game, version 1.21, which claims it enhances the performance of both single and multiple GPU processors.
As seen in the other games, you will get a much better return by adding another card than by overclocking. Crysis didn't scale that much without AA enabled, but as soon as AA is enabled, the benefit of another card really begins to shine.
3DMark®06 is the worldwide standard in advanced 3D game performance benchmarking. A fundamental tool for every company in the PC industry as well as PC users and gamers, 3DMark06 uses advanced real-time 3D game workloads to measure PC performance using a suite of DirectX 9 3D graphics tests, CPU tests, and 3D feature tests. 3DMark06 tests include all new HDR/SM3.0 graphics tests, SM2.0 graphics tests, AI and physics driven single and multiple cores or processor CPU tests and a collection of comprehensive feature tests to reliably measure next generation gaming performance today.
3DMark 06 doesn't scale as well with multi GPU solutions as other things. In this benchmark we begin to see some better return on the Turbo feature, gaining us 58 more points in the single card solution. Moving on to the newest installment in the 3DMark series we will see some more interesting results.
3DMark®Vantage is composed of four full-bore benchmarking tests (2 different CPU tests and 2 different GPU tests) and 6 feature tests. Four presets, a groundbreaking new feature, vastly augment the variety of PCs that can be tested with the product. Presets range from value through performance to high end cinematic rendering resolutions and features. By creating a new set of high end presets, 3DMark®Vantage is future proofed for the new multi-core CPU and Graphics Processing Unit products as well as supporting the Physics Processing Unit to expand the range of technology, testing and prevent the benchmark from being bottlenecked for its users.
The GPU results scale a lot nicer with the second card. The real benefit to the Turbo switch is when you use two of the cards in CrossfireX. I was able to raise the GPU score over 400 points with the CrossfireX setup by enabling the Turbo mode. This same solution helped raise my overall score a decent amount as well.
PCMark® Vantage is the first objective hardware performance benchmark for PCs running 32 and 64 bit versions of Microsoft® Windows Vista®. PCMark Vantage is perfectly suited for benchmarking any type of Microsoft® Windows Vista PC from multimedia home entertainment systems and laptops to dedicated workstations and hi-end gaming rigs. Regardless of whether the benchmarker is an artist or an IT Professional, PCMark Vantage shows the user where their system soars or falls flat, and how to get the most performance possible out of their hardware. PCMark Vantage is easy enough for even the most casual enthusiast to use yet supports in-depth, professional industry grade testing.
PCMark doesn't scale well with multi GPU setups so I only tested it with the single card.
PCMark does get a nice little 200 point boost when you put the card in Turbo mode. This is great if you are trying to compete with your friends for a high score, otherwise it doesn't amount to much.
Natural lighting makes artificial graphics life-like. Computers get faster, but rendering more polygons doesn't add value if lighting looks faked, so insiders know that the next big thing is proper lighting aka Realtime Global Illumination. Typical workloads in realtime rendering will shift. Lightsmark simulates it. Global Illumination renders often take hours. Is your computer fast enough for realtime?
LightsMark also does not scale well with multi GPU setups, so I tested it with the single card as well.
LightsMark shows a rather impressive 50 FPS increase when enabling the Turbo mode. I was kind of surprised that it made that much of a difference, considering the results on the prior tests.
This is one of those instances of, if you got it flaunt it. The Turbo switch isn't really necessary, when they could just as easily clock the card at the turbo specs. The only real reason you could need it is if you are super eco conscious and want to save a watt or two by leaving it down clocked whenever you're not gaming. The nice thing is that the specs on this card beat out the other cards in the same price range. For only about $265 you are getting a very good deal. The cooling system could have been engineered a bit better, to not blow hot air back into the case. The main boost I found from the Turbo switch was in synthetic benchmarks, which don't always mean that much in the real world. I was able to play Crysis on max settings as long as I didn't go crazy on the AA. With two of these babies you're just over the cost of a lower end GTX280, for a setup that can beat the 280 in some tests. It all comes down to how much you want to spend on your graphics setup. ATI's current strategy of not aiming for the stars in performance, but instead shooting for the atmosphere seems to be working for them so far. By aiming for the midrange market, they are able to cash in on a larger user base, as opposed to the enthusiast market, which Nvidia has always succeeded at.
I would recommend this graphics card to someone with a well cooled case and a desire to get a little bit more performance out of a card. That or someone with nostalgia for the turbo button.
