Quote Originally Posted by Lanek View Post
The question is not who will buy them, but who will reviews them and produce them.. If you end with 375W on it and with a chips who run at 100°C average gaming, you go in trouble... Without saying the additionnal cost for a beastly cooler and all the power phase, the PCB layer for support thoses load etc etc.. All of this have a cost, a cost you will need to put in the final price... I have see a lot of 295 or 5970 users who don't even know a **** about hardware buying thoses cards, they wanted the faster and the higher price... they have the money, they buy it ( there's full of peoples on "classic "hardware forums like that )

If they use GF114. they can maintain fast clock, and high OC margin... if they use GF110, they will need reduce the core and memory speed ( less of 700mhz for the core... ) this is what ask Zallbard about performance and where will be the real fight between the 6990 and this one. if the card perform around or under 570 level, 2x 6970 with 6950 clock speed ( who close 2x 580 SLI without problem ) will surely be enough... All in one, this will be a nice fight between both cards... i will not be surprised to see quickly Evga release Superclocked 590 and why not Sapphire / Asus release faster 6990 in response then. ( can be funny to watch as this is not really mainstream market... )

AIB as Evga, Asus, can pass the limit, no problem ( Ares etc ), they provide a better cooling ( include watercooling as for the GTX295 ). But Nvidia or AMD can't ... they need to comply to certain rules ( and one is the PCI express 300W limit ).
If not good people like EK exists and creates some superb blocks for them