Ok well having gone through roughly 10 cards this year including some XXX Editions ect, I reckon I've got some advice for you guys.
Special Edition Gpu's are not worth the money, its simply a way of punting the brand and for bragging rights.
At the moment I can't think of 1 single special edition GPU that is worth buying. Special edition gpu's are mostly gpu's with a pretty cooler and oc'd out the box, yeah you do get exceptions like the Asus ROG mars II which is a fantastic card but price wise...Its out of this world. You'd be much better off buying a normal card and clocking it yourself and as Tinman mentioned, you could always just pump up the fan, yeah it'll increase you're noise levels but who really cares about that.
Good case in point...MSI R6950 can be unlocked to a 6970 and costs around R2500, why spend R3600 on a MSI R6970 if you can get the same performance for a grand less with just a bit of tweaking?
