Well, sorry to be a bust but....I just ordered two new MSI 7970s from newegg for $576 and I get two $20 mail in rebates (but only1 per-house). Two EK water blocks is $214 so... I feel confident I will get better performance than one R9...and I can always disable one card this way in the case of Negative returns in crossfire scaling. It has been a pleasure but I don't want to be a victim of price-fixing this year. Being water cooled (more importantly the VRMs being water cooled) I will have absolutely no heat issues like I had previously with my air cooled 6970s. Hope you guys enjoy your R9s when they are release...I will probably end up skipping the R9 completely and wait for the 22nm gpu release from AMD.