@ WOW Guest

I have played wow with ati cards since release, currently 5850 and have never crashed? Guess your doing something wrong.

As I alluded to (somewhere in the forum) the 6950 doesn't seem to be a great overclocker. Seems AMD have noticed also, so I'd wait to see what kind of improvements the revision brings. Most certainly the blower/shroud is going to get reworked for better airflow. I don't know about the hard-locking of the shader blocks comment - it doesn't seem in character with AMD, although with better voltage regulation and better cooling it places the 6970 in a precarious position since it's price/performance ratio compared with the 6950 is likely to suffer further.
Could pay to wait until the revisions are out. If the overclocking headroom is raised substantially that will likely negate any gain you could achieve by unlocking the shaders- assuming the revisions are shader locked. If the revision brings negligable gains then you should still be able to source the current launch version (I doubt a great number of people will be drawn to unlocking their cards- most will be unaware of the unlocking, while it could remain outside the comfort zone of many who do know to try the mod). If the revisions remain soft-moddable then its a win/win situation

I Picked a powercolor 6950 up for £180 and while i haven't unlocked shaders justin case it runs a stable OC @ 960 core 1375 mem for 15% performance boost in heaven ON STOCK VOLTS. so yeah^^ not bad for a card that doesn't Oc too well eh?
Haven't found a stable Vcore for the old 1GHz mark and without better cooling I'm reluctant but people on overclockers forums have done.
In summation, you might get lucky like I did and bag yourself a card that's faster than stock 570/6970 for ~£100 less, plus no danger of hitting a RAM ceiling like the 560
Oh and before anyone thinks fanboi I was looking at a 560 till I found the deal for the 6950
Only drawback; this is a BIG card, with only 3mm clearance of the 3.5" bays in my CiT Storm