I buy this card nearly two month ago for one purpose : to unlock it to a Radeon 6970 . the first thing I do before I install it be to flick a tiny little switch near the CrossFire connector . it boot up , I go straight into gpu-z and there it be : 1536 shader as oppose to the stock 1408 shader . all thing consider , this card be more about overkill and bragging rights than pure performance . unless you plan to game at anything over 1920x1080 , or multi-monitor , one of these -lrb- + unlock -rrb- will handle anything you throw at it as long as it be support by a great combination of CPU -lrb- such as a core i5 2500k -rrb- , RAM , and a quality power supply . I be see some bottleneck with my AMD Phenom II x4 955 OC 'd to 4.0 GHz , so a Sandy Bridge Intel system would probably let this card flex its muscle better than my setup . if you do plan on gaming at higher resolution or on multiple monitor , and want to get two of these card for CrossFire , make sure you read up on the issue of micro-stuttering . micro-stutter only happen on multi-card setup , specifically dual-cf or dual-slus . tri-cf and tri-slus setup do not have the micro-stutter issue , so if you be really load , have a huge , full-tower case , and a motherboard capable of hold 3 of these , then that be definitely worth try out . regardless , you should buy this card specifically as it be one of the few non-reference 6950 that allow you to unlock to the performance level of a 6970 , and the unlock process be literally just a flick of a switch . ~ $ 250 for the performance of a $ 350 be not a bad deal at all . also worth mention - I have to jump through quite a few hoop to get my dirt3 game -lrb- which require Steam , I think -rrb- . after go online to enter my code , I have to also upload a scan image of my voucher and it take AMD about 24 hour to send I a code to activate the game on steam . the reason for this be because earlier in the year , some hacker steal a whole database of dirt3 voucher code and so AMD have to go through a few more security measure before they will give you a dirt3 download code . as for the game itself , it be alright , but would probably be much better if play with a controller or a steer wheel . like all drive game , it benefit from force feedback for the steering , which a keyboard simply can not provide .