Palit Revolution 700 (Radeon HD 4870 X2)
Manufacturer:Palit
UK Price (as reviewed):£373.74 (Inc. VAT)
US Price (as reviewed):NA
Core Clock: 750MHz
Memory Clock: 3,800MHz (effective)
Memory: 2GB GDDR5
Warranty: Two years (parts and labour)
Thanks to ATI/AMD’s fairly lenient approach to board partner card design, we’ve seen plenty of custom cooled Radeon HD 4850 and HD 4870s since RV770’s launch back in the summer. There have been plenty of cards using custom PCBs to help keep costs down and in some cases improve the card’s power delivery system.
However, the only custom cooled HD 4870 X2 we’ve seen so far has been the watercooled Sapphire 4870 X2 Atomic, which, while packing some impressive stock overclocks, compromised on CPU cooling and was prohibitively expensive.
Enter Palit with its latest foray into the custom cooled, pre-overclocked market, with the Revolution 700 4870 X2. Factory overclocked and fitted with a whopping triple slot, dual fan cooler, does it offer enough over the already impressive performance of a stock 4870 X2 to justify the price premium? Let’s find out.
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Looking at the Palit Revolution 700 Deluxe, it’s almost totally unrecognisable as a Radeon HD 4870 X2, with the already meaty dual slot stock cooler of the stock card replaced with Palit’s own monster triple slot cooler. The size of this card really can’t be understated – it is absolutely HUGE and will dominate any motherboard, not to mention potentially deny you access to a PCI slot, SATA ports or even your second PCI-E slot.
Beneath the R700’s black plastic shroud, which houses it’s two low profile 80mm cooling fans (both of which are wired into the card’s 4pin fan socket), are two chunky dual copper heat pipe heatsinks, each one mounted directly on top of one of the 4870 X2’s two RV770 cores to deliver superior GPU cooling compared to the stock solution. 
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With the dual heatsinks handling the GPU cores, Palit has then used two thick black aluminium plates, mounted to both the front side and backside of the card, to cool the card’s 2GB of GDDR5 and PWM array, with a pair of separate black aluminium heatsinks added on to assist heat dissipation. As with all of Palit’s custom cooled RV770 Cards, the R700 also uses a custom power delivery system, with a redesigned PWM architecture, although still using the low profile components from the stock card.
While the cooling for the front side of the card is very impressive, and certainly seems more capable than the dual slot paddle fan based stock cooler, the aluminium plate fitted to the backside of the card to cool the memory is identical to that of the stock model, and even comes with a “Warning – Hot Surface” sticker – no change from the stock 4870 X2 there then!
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