No battlefield 3 or Skyrim? Also, SLI 560 GTX vs 6950 in xfire would have been welcome.

What a shame, under powered cards when if it were not for that these would at least crack 900mhz with little effort. Should have been 6+1 vrm phase with 6+8pin power connectors. One might be able to squeeze out an extra 20-50mhz+ if they removed the IHS and replaced the gray goop that Nvidia used as thermal compound.
I wish they were cheaper and then they would be a great deal instead of being rather close to a 570 in price (us).

So in a nutshell it costs on average 20% more than the HD 6950, and to be honest it barely performs equally in most situations.

As to the crossfire/SLI request in a previous comment, let me save you time: avoid AMD's crossfire like the plague. Their drivers have definitely matured in the last couple years, and they are basically hiccup-free with single card setups. However, even though AMD dual GPU setups achieve near-perfect scaling that essentially doubles performance for most situations, AMD's xfire drivers still have a lot of maturing to do. There's always at least a handful of games/programs that don't work (ie blue screen of death, flickering shadows, negative scaling, laggy texture loads, frame skipping to name some of the issues I've had in only a mere few months of running crossfire). The main thing is in games, the xfire framerates aren't as consistent as with SLI. Look up micro-stuttering, in particular with crossfire and/or SLI setups. You'll get sudden wonky dips and spikes from 100+fps down to around 40fps and the perception of 'smooth' gameplay is absent as you experience an annoying stutter. If you do some research you'll see that SLI just has more consistent framerates and doesn't have that wonkiness *as often*. SLI maintains a steadier framerate than crossfire and has far better driver support. That being said, and I stress this: for single card solutions AMD's drivers are not really an issue like back in the day.

Here is a great article on the micro-stuttering subject matter.http://www.tomshardware.c...ter-crossfire,2995-5.html

a 6970 getting 30% more performance than a 6950 in AvP with AA makes no sense.