Palit Radeon HD 4850 Sonic

Overclocking

Like the HIS and Sapphire cards, the Palit Radeon HD 4850 Sonic comes with a respectable factory core overclock. However, unlike the aforementioned competitors to Palit, the Sonic doesn't come with a decent memory clock. In fact, we'd go as far as saying that it doesn't really come with a memory clock at all out of the factory.

With that in mind, we set about overclocking the card with our usual set of tools; we used RivaTuner v2.11 to adjust and monitor the card's clock speeds and then tested the card's stability using Crysis. Frequencies were increased from the card's stock speeds using 5MHz increments - a loop of our Crysis tests was run in between each clock speed increase to verify the card's stability.

It allows us to check not just for visual artifacting, but also for signs of clock throttling, where a clock speed increase results in either the same or lower performance than the previous results obtained.

The Palit Radeon HD 4850 Sonic comes clocked at 685MHz core and 2,000MHz (effective) memory and after a few hours of tinkering, we managed to settle on 755MHz core and 2,210MHz on the memory. These clocks aren't bad, but when we increased the core beyond 755MHz, the card actually reset its core clock to 725MHz according to the various clock speed monitoring tools we have available to us.

This overclock represents a nine percent increase in core speed and a 10.5 percent increase in memory clock - that's not too bad, but it's not as impressive as what we saw with the HIS. Of course, like power consumption and operating temperatures, overclocking is a bit of a lottery and your mileage will vary - manufacturing a GPU with almost a billion transistors is not something you'll learn about in a science lesson.

Final Thoughts...

We have to say we really like the Palit Radeon HD 4850 Sonic - the cooling solution performs incredibly well and the PCB redesign has enabled Palit to keep the price of this card down at around £120 (inc. VAT), which makes it an attractive proposition considering the factory overclock. Of course, it would have been nice of Palit to overclock the memory a bit further, but we understand why it hasn't done this. All of the Radeon HD 4850s we've seen have been able to run at clock speeds in excess of 685MHz, but memory is a little harder to guarantee to certain clock speeds without bumping the price up.

The direct competition really comes from the Powercolor Radeon HD 4850 PCS+, which is the same price, and the HIS Radeon HD 4850 IceQ 4 TurboX that is still unavailable and hasn't dropped in price despite hearing rumblings of a slight tweak happening. The Powercolor is outperformed in just about every scenario by the Palit and it's the same price. The HIS, on the other hand, performs better still but it's £15 more.

The GeForce 9800 GTX+ is the closest competition from Nvidia, but they're not available for anything less than £125 (inc. VAT) and the 4850 is a better performer in the tests we've run; it's without doubt our preferred choice at this price point even if the Nvidia offerings deliver better performance in Crysis. When it comes down to it, the 4850 delivers playable frame rates at exactly the same resolution, anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering settings as the 9800 GTX+ in this title, so it makes the frame rate advantage less of an importance in our opinion.

On the whole then, Palit's Radeon HD 4850 Sonic is a great option and one that we'd wholeheartedly recommend to anyone looking for some serious bang for buck at just over £120.

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