GTX 260 Sonic First Look

In this section, we give a brief first look at the new Palit GeForce GTX 260 Sonic 216SP. Palit is a well known manufacturer of both NVIDIA and ATI discrete graphics cards, and they work hard to leverage unique engineering over a large range of desktop graphics product lines. Our first evidence of this was the Palit Revolution 700 Radeon HD 4870 X2 Video Card, which consumed three expansion card slots to ensure that cooling performance was second to none. Aftermarket cooling improvements matched to factory overclocked GPUs and plenty of headroom for additional tweaking are all part of the Palit standard.

It's a rare occasion that we see an NVIDIA product using ATI's red-colored printed circuit board (PCB), but since Palit offers both Radeon and GeForce products it's not at all uncommon. Palit has been known to somehow consistently exploit my favorite color combinations in their products. I really liked the orange shroud on the Palit GeForce 9800 GT Super+, but for the Sonic 216SP they've kept to recent tradition and followed a Black with yellow accents theme. From the top view, it's difficult to tell the Palit GeForce GTX 260 Sonic 216SP and Revolution 700 apart. Unlike most NVIDIA AIC partners, who simply brand their allotment of video cards with a decal (or supplies the decal to NVIDIA for distribution), Palit has acquired the engineering information necessary to create a modified variety of the GTX 260 graphics card.

The underside (or top once installed) of the Palit GeForce GTX 260 Sonic 216SP shown below exposes sensitive electronic components, but also acts as a heat-dissipating surface similar to many previous GeForce generations. Although the new 55nm GPU does expose surrounding components to less heat, nearly every heat-building component resides on the opposite side of the PCB. Quite ironically, from the PCB it appears the Sonic 216SP nearly looks identical to the Radeon HD 4870 it competes against.

The NVIDIA GTX 260 series graphics card is a performance optimized high-end product on every level. Power is drawn from the PCI Express host bus as well as from two 6-pin power connections (which matches the needs of the GTX 285). Without any auxiliary power provided to the GeForce GTX 260 graphics card, a LED on the header bracket will shine red and the graphics card will not display any picture. In addition, any connector that is not adequately powered will also turn red. Together this functionality offers immediate feedback for enthusiasts concerned about providing adequate power to the GPU.

The Palit GeForce GTX 260 Sonic 216SP utilizes a full-length dual-slot cooling unit to keep the GTX200 GPU well below the reference operating specifications. While the custom-designed fan unit obviously seems to cool the 55nm die well enough, I am very disappointed that more thought was given to a more functional design. The two 80mm cooling fans located atop the cooling unit shroud draw air in and force it over the face of two independent heat-pipe coolers tucked below. This design is exactly identical to the Palit Revolution 700 Radeon HD 4870 X2, all the way from the improved cooling performance to the engineering flaws.

The reference thermal cooling solution design NVIDIA offers may not be perfect, but it's questionable whether or not Palit's version is any better. Even if the new engineering does offers better cooling (which we discuss after the test results), the bigger issue is the lack of externally exhausting air from this video card. The reference design expels nearly all of the heated exhaust outside of the computer case through the grill on the mounting bracket. While the grill used on the Sonic 216SP is the same as reference models, there is nearly no air pushed out of these vents. Instead, nearly all of the heated air is exhausted through the side and rear of the shroud. Ultimately this adds up to an increased internal temperature inside the computer case, which doesn't do the other hardware components any good and can eventually lead to system instability.

Moving on to our detailed look in the next section, Benchmark Reviews will give a close inspection of the technology inside the Palit GeForce GTX 260 Sonic 216SP NE3X262SFT394-PM8026 video card.

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