Palit GTX 570 Sonic Platinum Edition

Palit has made a name for themselves in the graphics card business by offering competitively priced cards which became really popular when AMD (ATI back then) announced their 4000 series (HD 4850 and HD 4870). It’s been a long time since we’ve reviewed a Palit graphics card which could be attributed to the fact that about a year back, many consumers reported issues about the cards developing problems after a few months' usage. This was later confirmed by a couple of retailers in Lamington road, as well. It's almost been a year now, hopefully, Palit has taken this time to sort out their issues as it would be a real shame to lose a good brand. They’ve sent us their GTX 570 Sonic Platinum Edition for review and from the looks of it, it will go head-to-head with Asus’s GTX 570 Direct CU II that we reviewed a few weeks back. 

Design and Features

Two fans for twice the cooling

Palit has gone with their own custom cooler design which makes it a little longer than the reference 10.5-inches. As this is the Sonic Platinum edition, the core and memory are both overclocked by about 10 per cent. The core speed is bumped up from 732MHz to 800MHz while the 1.28GB is set at 4000MHz (effective speed) from the stock 3800MHz (effective speed). Palit has used a rather flimsy looking gray plastic cover for the heatsink. Within that, we have two fans for cooling the card. The base of the heatsink is copper and so are the two heatpipes for each of the cores. The heatpipes terminate into a bunch of aluminum fins which are then cooled by the fans. 

Connectivities galore

For connectivity, we have two dual-link DVI ports, HDMI and DisplayPort. There’s even a little vent above for dispensing the hot air. The rear of the card doesn't have any back-plate and is left exposed. To power the card, you’ll need two 6-pin connectors along with a good 550W power supply.

Test Rig Specifications

Processor: Intel Core i7-2600K CPU @ 3.40 GHz

Motherboard: GIGABYTE P67A-UD3R

Memory: Corsair Dominator GT 6 GB DDR3 (3 x 2 GB)

Hard drive: WD Velociraptor  300 GB

GPU: Palit GTX 570 Sonic Platinum 

PSU: Cooler Master Silent Pro 1000W

Driver Version : 275.33