Quote Originally Posted by kadozer View Post
Their nice way of saying : We gotta account for the noobs out there with crappy psu's trying to run this.
No, it's more so system integrators can carry on using cheap and nasty PSUs to keep their margins up. If a PSU says it is 850W you'd expect it to run this card OC'd. Think again, I've destroyed dozens of supposed 850W units with GTX275s, 4890s, even 4850s with an aggressive over clock and a couple of hours of full load.

The main concern for the card vendors is that the cards will comeback for RMA after crashing due to power issues in systems with PSUs that meet the minimum standard but have degraded over time.

So yeah, they are taking the risk that those who know will see it as a 400W card and overclock it to or beyond 5870 limits and that those who don't can be fobbed off with 'buy a better PSU' when their system wont do the new thing.

The length issue helps as generally people who have case's that will take it will have decent PSUs so should reduce the number of incompatible returns.