The Card

With the package out the way it's time to move onto the card and straight away we can see the inclusion of the new cooler that Palit has decided to use. Using a blue colored aluminum, the cooler feels excellent and is up to the normal high grade that we have become accustom to from Palit.

Due to the design not covering the whole card, Palit have also placed a heatsink towards the back right of the card to cover some of the hotter components. We can also see the plate in the background that covers the memory which is nice; it is so often that we see companies just chuck a heatsink on the core and not worry about any of the other components.

As you would expect, we have the standard PCI Express power connector which is a lot more visible this time around thanks to it not being covered under a bit of the heatsink fan cover as normal. We can also see a closer look at the heatsink that is down the back of the card.

The top of the card also has the standard SLI connector like all other 8800GT cards, and here we can also see a better look of how the plate covers the memory to help keep all components on the card cool.

Finally we move over to the I/O department of things and we have with us our Dual DVI ports which of course support up to a maximum resolution of 2560 x 1600 thanks to their Dual Link connectivity, along with the standard TV Out port.

What we can also see here is that the card is now a dual slot one as opposed to all the other 8800GT cards we have seen which use the standard single slot heatsink. It's not really a huge deal with so many people becoming used to the idea of a decent video card taking up two slots, and if it helps keep both the noise and the temperature down when compared to the stock 8800GT then it's worth it as far as we're concerned.

Specifications

Like we had mentioned earlier, this particular card carries the Sonic name which tells us hat it comes pre-overclocked out of the box. Palit hasn't gone too crazy with the speeds and has chosen to simply bump the core up to 650MHz over the standard 600MHz, with the memory moving up to 1900MHz DDR over the standard 1800MHz DDR. The shader clock has also taken an increase thanks to the core going up which moves it from 1500MHz to 1650MHz.