If you are the kind of user who simply wants to install a graphics card, install the drivers and start gaming without doing any further tweaking, then the Palit GeForce GTX 460 Sonic Platinum is definitely an excellent choice. Its massive out of the box overclock of 800 MHz core and 1000 MHz memory can result in a substantial performance improvement compared to the reference design which runs at 675 / 900 MHz (core/memory). Palit has also chosen to equip their card with 1 GB of GDDR5 memory. Compared to the 768 MB GTX 460 cards this yields an additional performance increase, even though the difference is small when compared to the price increase. Palit has priced their card at $249 which is $20 more than the 1 GB reference design. Considering you will see over 20% of performance gained for $20, the price increase is more than justified, it actually makes the card a better deal than the reference design when looking at price/performance. However, the GeForce GTX 460 with 768 MB is still a better deal in that scenario.
As mentioned before the overclock out of the box is great for novice users, but experienced overclockers may as well opt for a non-overclocked version and save some money. When overclocked manually, the Palit GTX 460 Sonic Platinum reaches about the same clock speeds as all the other reference design cards we tested so far. A small problem that happened to me is that one of the fan blades broke off really easily. Whether this was a pre-existing defect or just a bad choice of material on Palit's side, I don't know.
Overall Palit has done a good job with their GeForce GTX 460 Sonic Platinum. It can almost reach GTX 470 performance levels, at a substantially lower price and trumps competition with the low energy consumption of NVIDIA's new GF104 graphics processor.