Palit's custom designed GTX 260 Sonic can deliver easily when it comes to performance. Being overclocked out of the box it already has a healthy advantage over the reference design GTX 260 216 shader cards. If you are planning to beat the GeForce GTX 280 - no problem. Just overclock the card a bit more, which is easy since there is plenty of overclocking headroom left. However, die hard overclockers may want to stick with the reference design since those cards employ a voltage regulator made by Volterra. Recently it has been discovered that these cards can be softmodded to run at higher voltages. The Realtek voltage regulator on the Palit GTX 260 Sonic does not allow that.
Palit's choice to go with a dual fan design certainly sounds attractive to the overclockers who only care about performance and are less concerned with the fan noise. Compared to the reference design GTX 260, the fans are running a bit louder. If you are willing to manually adjust fan speeds via software you can easily turn down the fan quite a bit and run at high speeds during overclocking.
Overall the Palit GeForce GTX 260 Sonic 216 SP is a worthy alternative if you are looking for a non-reference design card. Even though the price point is not finalized yet, we expect something in the range of $250 with possible price reductions in the future.