Custom Cooler at Last - Palit GeForce GTX 260 Sonic 216 SP

Our Prayers Answered... At Last!

Thanks to driver upgrades, NVIDIA's GTX 200 series of cards are looking competitive again and none more so than their GeForce GTX 260 Core 216 (hence forth known as GTX 260+). Armed with more stream processors, a reference GeForce GTX 260+ was more than a match of its rival, the Radeon HD 4870 from ATI. However, if there was anything the NVIDIA cards were lacking, it was custom cooling solutions.

ATI's Radeon HD 4870 cards had long had custom coolers. PowerColor's PCS+ HD 4870 was one of the earliest Radeon HD 4870 cards we tested, and even then it was already utilizing a PCS+ cooling solution customized by ZEROtherm. Sometime later, we tested Palit's HD 4870 Sonic, which had a dual-fan cooling solution that would later form the basis of the cooler found on the Revolution 700. While all this was happening, NVIDIA was completely out of action as far as customized coolers were concerned, much like a child who had brought nothing for show-and-tell in class. Until now, that is.

The new Palit GeForce GTX 260 Sonic 216 SP (hence forth known as Palit GTX 260+ Sonic) is like a breath of fresh air in a stale warehouse or like an attractive lady in an army barrack full of men. Featuring a dual-fan cooling solution that closely resembles that of the one found on the triple-slot Revolution 700, the Palit GTX 260+ Sonic, is to our knowledge the first GTX 260+ card, or any GTX 200 series card for that matter, to employ the use of a customized cooler. At long last, we can finally say goodbye to boring and frankly quite ineffective NVIDIA reference coolers.

Before we reveal more about this exciting-looking card, here's a look at the card itself.

The Palit GeForce GTX 260 Sonic 216 SP

First of all, the card's name should give you a clue of what to expect. The Sonic badge, much like Type-R badges on souped-up Hondas, indicates that it is from Palit's line of factory-overclocked cards. If you are wondering, and you must be, the Palit GTX 260+ Sonic comes with its core clocked at 625MHz, memory at 2200MHz DDR and shaders at 1348MHz, substantially more than the reference's clock speeds of 576MHz at the core, 1998MHz DDR at the memory, and finally, 1242MHz at the shaders. What these figures all mean is that it should perform significantly better than a reference GTX 260+.

However, sheer outright clock speeds are not the core focus in this segement. The highlight of this card has got to be its customized cooler. The cooler, at first glance, is remarkably similar to the one found the Revolution 700, except that it is slimmer and the whole card only occupies two slots in total. It features massive twin 75mm fans, which blow cool air over an elaborate heatsink with triple heat pipes and multiple fins. It looks really aggressive and we are hoping for some good temperature readings in our tests.

Test Setup

As per tradition, the Palit GTX 260+ Sonic was put through its paces using our Vista system which has the following specifications:

Windows Vista SP1 Test System

• Intel Core 2 Extreme QX6850 (3.00GHz)
• Gigabyte X38T-DQ6 motherboard
• 2 x 1GB DDR3-1333 Aeneon memory in dual channel mode
• Seagate 7200.10 200GB SATA hard drive
• Windows Vista Ultimate with SP1

The GeForce GTX 260+ is set to go against the Radeon HD 4870 so we'll be throwing in two overclocked Radeon HD 4870 into the mix, namely Sapphire's HD 4870 Toxic Edition and HIS' HD 4870 IceQ 4+ Turbo. Also, to spice things up a little, a reference Radeon HD 4870, Radeon HD 4850 and the new GeForce GTX 285 were also added to the gauntlet.

The list of cards tested and their driver versions:

• Palit GeForce GTX 260 Sonic 216 SP (ForceWare 181.20)
• NVIDIA GeForce GTX 260 Core 216 (ForceWare 181.20)
• Leadtek WinFast GTX 260 Extreme+ (Core 216) (ForceWare 180.48)
• Sapphire HD 4870 1GB Toxic Edition (Catalyst 8.12)
• HIS Radeon HD 4870 IceQ 4+ Turbo (Catalyst 8.12)
• ATI Radeon 4870 512MB (Catalyst 9.1)
• ATI Radeon 4850 512MB (Catalyst 9.1)
• NVIDIA GeForce GTX 285 (181.20)

The cards were tested using the following benchmarks:

• Futuremark 3DMark06
• Futuremark 3DMark Vantage
• Crysis Warhead
• Far Cry 2
• Unreal Tournament 3

Windows Vista Results - 3DMark06

In our previous tests using NVIDIA's latest ForceWare 181.20 drivers, we remarked that they weren't optimized for the 3DMark06. And this led to NVIDIA cards putting in some disappointing figures for this benchmark, and the Palit GeForce GTX 260+ Sonic was no different. It struggled against a reference-clocked Radeon HD 4870 and only managed to pull away when we increased the settings. Given that the Palit card comes factory-overclocked, we expected it to do much better.

Windows Vista Results - 3DMark Vantage

Coming to Vantage, the Palit GeForce GTX 260+ Sonic began to show signs of what it was capable of doing. It easily dispatched all its Radeon HD 4870 rivals. Even the overclocked Sapphire HD 4870 Toxic Edition and HIS Radeon HD 4870 IceQ 4+ Turbo was no match for it. Also of note is how much better the GeForce GTX 285 performed.

Windows Vista Results - Crysis Warhead & Far Cry 2

The Palit GeForce GTX 260+ Sonic continued its good showing in Crysis Warhead where it outperformed its ATI rivals again. However, its lead was apparent only on the lower settings. At the higher resolutions with anti-aliasing turned on, it was barely a single frame faster than the Sapphire and HIS duo of factory-overclocked Radeon HD 4870 cards.

In Far Cry 2, the Palit GeForce GTX 260+ Sonic really shone when the going got rough. With 8x anti-aliasing turned on, it was about 18% faster than the quickest Radeon HD 4870 card - the Sapphire HD 4870 Toxic Edition. And even on the most demanding setting (1920 x 1440, 8x AA), it still managed playable frame rates of 32.28fps. On the other hand, its competitors could only do 27+ fps at best - below the 30fps threshold.

Windows Vista Results - Unreal Tournament 3

NVIDIA cards have traditionally fared better on Unreal Tournament 3, but it seems that their dominance erodes with each driver revision. Here, the Palit GeForce GTX 260+ Sonic was only a smidge faster than a reference Radeon HD 4870, and was a notch slower than both the Sapphire and HIS cards. Of course, with all cards posting over 100fps, such differences would be virtually impossible to detect with the naked eye.

Temperature

Judging from our experience with Palit Revolution 700, which recorded fantastic temperature readings, we were feeling hopeful for the Palit GeForce GTX 260+ Sonic, since both coolers are highly identical. So imagine our disappointment then when we found out it still recorded a sizzling 70 degrees Celsius. This represented a drop of only four degrees Celsius over the reference cooler. Of course the Palit card is overclocked, but we still expected a significant difference in cooling capacity with their custom cooler. Unfortunately that wasn't the case here.

Power Consumption

Not much good news to report here either as the Palit GeForce GTX 260+ Sonic topped out at 282W at load, which was not too far of from the Leadtek WinFast GTX 260 Extreme+'s 288W which we tested sometime ago. However, its idle reading of 171W is significantly greater than the Leadtek's 148W. Our guess is that this could be because of the Palit card's twin fan cooler design as opposed to the Leadtek's single fan one. To some extent it could also be due to the custom board design which hasn't paid off in the power consumption segment.

Overclocking

Fortunately, the Palit GeForce GTX 260+ Sonic picked itself up when it came to overclocking. Using the in-built overclocking tool in the NVIDIA Control Panel, we successfully got the card to run at a stratospheric 720MHz at the core and a respectable 2600MHz DDR at the memory. 720MHz is a good 95MHz increase over the default clock speed of 625MHz; and a whopping 144MHz more than a reference card's 576MHz. The 200MHz DDR boost that we got on the memory was good too. This allowed us to get a 15% increase in performance on Vantage with the Performance preset.

Trying Hard to be Cool...

We were pleasantly surprised that Palit has finally given us what we've been waiting, asking, praying for all this while: a GTX 200 series card with a custom cooler. The Palit GeForce GTX 260+ Sonic certainly scores points by being the first, but its cooler was a little underwhelming. A four degrees Celsius reduction in operating temperatures is nothing to honk about, and we were perplexed as to why it performed so poorly. Perhaps NVIDIA's default cooler wasn't as bad as poor as we had thought of, but we certainly felt that Palit's cooler could have performed better despite the card being highly overclocked out of the box.

Fortunately, the Palit GeForce GTX 260+ Sonic was without doubt a capable performer. As our results showed, it was more than a match even for factory-overclocked Radeon HD 4870 cards. Let's also not forget its insane overclocking abilities. Taking price into consideration, the Palit GeForce GTX 260+ Sonic is set to retail at US$260, making it only a tad more expensive than reference cards. In fact, a quick search on Newegg indicated that it is one of the cheaper factory-overclocked GeForce GTX 260+ cards you can find.

Locally, the Palit GeForce GTX 260+ has a going price of S$369, making it a very attractive option when you consider most 1GB variants of the Radeon HD 4870 are going from S$350 to S$399.

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