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What's faster: turbo speed, or sonic speed? That's one of the questions we'll be looking at day in this review of the HD 4870 Sonic Dual Edition, from Palit.

The first wave of ATI HD 4870 video cards have made a big splash, surprising everyone with exceptional levels of performance. But as that first wave of cards crested, many hardware reviewers, myself included, wondered what the next wave would be like. Given some time, you'd suspect that all the various board partners would be tweaking and altering the designs of their cards somewhat, trying to make their own particular twist stand out of the pack.

Today we have on such card. From the many reviews of Palit products on this website, without out a doubt all of their Sonic editions have had something just a little bit different to set them apart from the rest of the pack. With the HD 4870 Sonic 512MB, we have a couple of little interesting modifications to the reference board design. The most visible change with this Sonic is the inclusion of a turbo switch. Accessible from the back of your card, this little switch can kick your clocks up a notch. But is it only a gimmick? Hopefully we'll answer this question after we take a closer look at the latest enthusiast card.

Before we take a gander at this card though, let's take a little overview of the current happenings in the world of video cards.

As said earlier, ATI came out with some surprisingly zippy video cards with the introduction of the HD 4870 and HD 4850, which really shook up the current pricing landscape of video cards. At the start of this generation, NVIDIA had the performance crown with the GTX 280, but was beat on the cost-for-performance ratio of the HD 4870. Likewise the HD 4850 mostly triumphed over the second biggest weapon in the NVIDIA arsenal, the GTX 260, when it first came out. 

Pretty much a reverse of the last generation, this time around it was NVIDIA who was prompted to cut prices in order to be more competitive. After the price cuts, the GTX 280 stacked up better to the HD 4870, though the edge still fell towards the HD 4870 as far as bang-for-buck. But even then, NVIDIA did not hang on to the single-card performance crown all that long before HD4870X2 dual-GPU card came, and took it away.

To compete against the HD 4850, NVIDIA quickly planned two maneuvers : the first was a update of the 9800 GTX to the 9800 GTX+. The '+' translated into a clock speed boost, and a move to a smaller 55nm manufacturing process. The second maneuver happened just recently with the GTX 260.

The GTX 260 needed a bit more horsepower to better compete, so NVIDIA updated the card by unlocking additional bank of 24 shaders. However this time around they didn't opt to use the '+' designation, perhaps not wanting to sink sales of existing stocks of GTX 260 cards. With this shader boost the GTX 260 gained about 5% to 10% performance gains -- but, unfortunately, with this shader boost also came significant price increase, which does not seem to be going anywhere anytime soon.  

At the mid-range, the cards available for $100 are very impressive. The most recent, the HD 4670, offered a good amount of performance at the $80, promising 30 FPS in many games at 'high' settings. On the NVIDIA side, arguably a better deal is the 9600 GSO, which sells for about the same price, but is a little bit quicker in many benchmarks. Besides the two new entries, remained HD 3870 and 8800 GT cards are also going for very little, falling as low as $75 sometimes, and the 9600 GT has also proven to be a fine deal, often selling at a price point of between $100 - $120 USD.

With the high-end and mid-range cards out to market, it seems like the rate of new video cards coming down the pipes will be slowing down somewhat, before it presumably will pick up again for the seasonal buy-a-thon commonly referred to as Christmas. Rumors abound regarding ATI releasing some more low to mid-range cards, but these are likely just going to fill out their product line, and not be radically new or different from existing models. Another rumor swirls around a possible refresh of the HD 4870 to counter the bonus shaders now found in the GTX 260.

Right now, there is a card for pretty much everyone. And just in time, too. It seems like an unprecedented amount of stellar PC games are coming out this October, and many are hungry for hardware. Crysis Warhead, Dead Space, Fallout 3, Far Cry 2, Left for Dead. You best skip school or book some time off of work  -- because very soon now, it's going to be time to play.