Palit GeForce 8800 GTS 1GB Sonic SLI Video Card Review

Introduction

Palit is a new to the US company that has been churning out enthusiast level graphics cards in Europe and Asia that are starting to turn heads here in the states, and for good reason. Palit puts great thought and engineering into each of their products and it shows. From the PCB up, Palit marches to the beat of its own drum, meaning no reference model designs here. This speaks well to the old adage of listening to your customers. So while you might spend a little more money than on a similar product from other vendors, its not the same design as other companies offerings with a me too game and bundle. Legit Reviews first experience with Palit hardware was with their 9600 GT Sonic. The card featured a unique Orange cooling solution along with increased core and memory speeds. It also came with a whos who of connectors, including dual Dual Link DVI, DisplayPort, HDMI, and even an optical SPDIF. Right there, the little extra money you spent may be the perfect investment for those that dont upgrade their video card that often, but may be looking at a new monitor with one of these connectors. Most times you would have to locate and purchase a special edition of an existing card at an inflated price to get HDMI and/or DisplayPort.

So while we thought highly of the 9600 GT Sonic, Palit had more in store for us. They recently sent along a pair of their own limited edition graphics cards based on the 8800 GTS 512, only with 1GB of memory on each one. These cards also ship with higher clock speeds, not only the core but memory also. Paired with the great cooling heatsink and card design the Palit 8800 GTS 1GB is a dream-come-true for high-end gamers.

The first thing you spot on the Palit 8800 GTS 1GB is that orange casing on the card. You might also notice that it has a red PCB which you’d expect to find on an ATI card, but rarely see on NVIDIA flavors. Like all 8800 GTS cards the Palit 1GB is a dual slot design that only requires a single PCI-e power connector.

Moving around to the backside of our card we see something radically different, a giant back plate that also functions as a heatspreader for the additional memory added to the back side of the card. However, we ran into a couple of challenges due to this, more on that later.

At the heart of our 8800 GTS is the G92 core clocked at 730 MHz which is a generous step up from the 650MHz that comes on most 8800 GTS 512MB cards. Not only does our card have double the memory, its clocked higher than the standard 512MB cards as well, coming in at 2100MHz versus 1940MHz for the standard card.

Finally, out back we see that our cards have the standard connections with dual Dual-Link DVI and the S-Video style connector that allows you to connect an adaptor to it to display on a display with RGB connections.