1) My 680s are at @ 1.3GHz. I don't think they are binned poorly.7970 is stil better imo than GTX 680.
7970 gains more from OC than 680 and probably higher % of good bins vs bad bins.
7970 has better electrical design IMO.
7970 has excellent performance across all games, 680 chokes hard on a few.
7970 capable of higher quality GFX than 680 due to Alpha sharpen/better -lod/Temporal AA.
7970 has better video playback....don't argue...look it up.
7970 in general performs better in crossfire (better scaling)
7970 performs better in openGL
7970 is better for compute
7970 stable frequency/power draw prevents too big/too little a power supply(saving $/problems)
AMD/ATI has a better tweak program for obscure settings. (ATT)
no way in hell I'd switch to NV.
2) Maybe, but who cares? It's the end performance that matters, serious LN2 coolers will mod the cards anyways.
3) Not that I've seen. In the games the 680 does poorly in, the gap isn't that great, and the 680 wins in other games, sometimes by a lot.
4) Correct me if I am wrong but AMD still doesn't have a way of forcing AA in deferred rendering titles, do they? NVIDIA has FXAA in the drivers, and NVIDIA Inspector enables way more AA support than anything I saw when I had AMD cards, including RadeonPro.
5) Maybe, but I don't use this card for my media PC, I use it for gaming. My 6450 works better for HTPC.
6) Not that I've seen on places like [H].
7) AMD has terrible OpenGL drivers though, unless they finally fixed D3 engine and Q3 engine games. I can't name a newer game that runs in OpenGL except Rage, and that ran like garbage on AMD cards at launch.
8) Yes.
9) .... what?
10) NVIDIA Inspector is the best tweak program I have used.
I'm sorry, I think the 7970s are great cards, but I needed to upgrade to a 2-card solution to beat my 580s in performance, and the 7970 CFX driver situation, at least from what I read on the forums, is pretty awful. I haven't had a single problem with SLI GTX680s yet, in Witcher 2, Mass Effect 3, Battlefield 3, etc. And they overclock very easily as well.