They had to mod the BIOS so it boots with lower clocks so YES it had something to do with the BIOS. There might have been stability issues but it was the memory being too high that caused the overheating on these, just by downclocking the ram it was able to cool down itself with the stock cooler, below 50c. No flickering/crashes/bugs ever running 6 months, ofc not all cards the same. Notice the difference since the 4870
http://www.driverheaven.net/reviews....842&pageid=20#
What ATI talked about stability loss is when they lowered the CORE clock, not the ram, hell i even ran it at 100mhz no problem.