ok well, have had this card for a little more then a year now, my overall opinion of it vs (every) other 7970s is very very poor, when I first got it it ended up going into a 3-4month RMA due to an unnumbered amount of crashing and overall strife, its volt-locked, doesn't have any overclocking possibility (literally none), and just having any ASUS software installed causes sporadic rainbow screen crashes every half an hour or less, and in the RMA process ASUS insisted it was fine and I ended up spending an extra 50 bucks or so over the already 550 I spent on it...
so now, I have entered into folding@home as I have more time to mess with my hardware, only a day in and it ended up triggering a 0xa0000001 BSOD, the temperature had gone over 70C and caused it to loose stability...
other 7970s will handle up to 99C on stock settings, if you overclock them over 1100 core you generally need to keep them below ~65C to keep them stable, but this card is running at the stock of 1000 core and 1400 memory and crashes using the stock fan profile, but seems fine if I ramp the fan over 60%, making it much louder then a reference card at the same clocks, all in all very disappointed.
so as the end note, am I going to take it that this is all of ASUS's perfect design that their cards act this way and I'm going to permanently stay away from, or does ASUS want to admit their mistake and give me a proper piece of hardware? Ive already had to point people away from this card for all the reasons above, this is ASUS's choice to make, not mine.
thanks -Paul
