This is indeed a bummer of a thread, but keep in mind a problem caused by a bad flash can be corrected by a proper flash. in a little while the software should be out to fix the cards up, more than likely it is going to involve a pci card boot and flash or similar, but it should be correctable.

I feel the culprit is not realising that you can't add voltage to the cards through bios,( only about .01v) so the speeds won't boot. then when the card gets powered down and tries to reboot it lacks the voltage to do so properly. could someone please report back the vcore on boot of a "dead" card. and some hi-res photos of the bottom of the card in the voltage area..