I hate that ideology, but I guess that's business :shadedshu
Anyway, nice review W1z, always a pleasure looking at the numbers you come up with
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I'm sorry because I don't like flame but here it is for what it's worth. And I really am sorry to type this crap.
The clocks that certain cards come with (so I read and so I hope) are special tested GPU's that can run with stability at higher clock ratings and so they go into the special package lineup for each company that does it.
If they did it hit and miss or every chip could do it then they would all have higher clock settings starting with the reference cards because they know they can do it without a load of failed cards.
As the people or companies that buy the GPU's in large numbers they run their own tests to find GPU's that they feel can run at higher clocks with no errors or failures. They also try to make them last even longer by putting a better heatsink/fan so the card will work for at least 2 years or so.
But they would not use untested GPUs for a lot of obvious reason and these reasons end up costing them and us more for these types of cards because it makes the end user very mad at any company that sells a card that has a high failure rate, they want their customers to be happy with their products and in this segment of the industry it is really important to have a trusted name.
No company in their right mind would do this for a lot of reasons, mostly credibility because without that they don't sell products.
To search though a batch of GPU's that they buy takes time which is money so when they do put out the higher clocked ones it's reasonable to charge higher prices for their effort in finding GPU's that will be stable 100% of the time versus random ones that everyone gets and might get away with overclocking as high but have to either raise the voltage and put better cooling on or run the existing setup fan speeds at a high level with corresponding noise that no one likes and still they may see artifacts or glitches and shorten the life of their cards in the process.
And please, don't come in being a Nvidia ass kisser ok? The people that read this are smart enough to make up their own minds about which brand they want to run.
And the Nvidia cards are really not much if any faster across the line because with the new driver software the 7900 series beats it in a few game and losses in others and they are both pretty damm close to each other performance wise. They are both good cards and no one would be put out buying either one so do more reading yourself before putting you keyboard like foot in your mouth and don't come off sounding like (ugh, this I hate) a Nvidia fan only even if the facts don't bear it out.
It's cool to prefer brands and support the company so it stays in business but that should always be left at home and not thrown all over the web. If you actually think one is better then give links and proof to back it up. I've read enough to know they are pretty toe to toe performance wise and cost is really the factor in buying one over the other.
Again, very sorry to sound cruel, I don't like doing this but I really hate fan posts because it just puts mud up there to confuse people that are after credible information on what to buy.
And the second problem is using a test rig that is not what people use so the data given doesn't help anyone one bit.
If someone has a cpu clocked at 3.2GHZ and thinks they will get the same performance and goes out and buys it only to find they should have gotten a better card because they see the numbers and think they can come close or see lag spikes instead then they just learned they can't trust web site benchmarks because they really are useless. I've only seen one site that did a real comp. test of cpu/gpu performance and the results were quite a eye opener. You may get the FPS that is shown on tests like this one but it's a very very fluctuating graph {not shown here }and gives no data on actual playability.
I've seen it enough to know this is a very important area that no one (except this site called the Tech Report, yeah the name is close to this site but they are different sites) really gave a huge going over with different cpu's at different speeds with various popular video cards and the data given showed that the basic FPS on most reviews is absolutely useless because they never STAY at that speed and most have mill-second spikes that you notice at times like the game gets a little jerky even though you can test it and get 80FPS but it's still a jerky game in areas that the tested data says it will not slip down below 20FPS on a regular basis but with some computers this happens quite a bit more than is comfortable to see.
For the most part a lot of the tests are just hit enticement for the websites income and they spend as little time as they can on these tests to bring in people to get the hit count up and that is the sad reality of the information super highway we call the web or internet where 1% is intelligent and .05% is useful while the rest is filler and disinformation with money being the driving factor in the end and that is down right sad. You really do have to be smart in the first place to be able to filter the useless from the useful.
For what it's worth to this site, it IS a good site and it may not have the time to do a good enough review and just give the basics but everyone is doing this and the readers really are not getting useful information to take to the store and pick out the right video card and this really makes me mad because video cards are not cheap and when people may have to save up money to buy one and then finds out it's not what they needed and end up blowing a lot of money.
I got zapped this way and ended up going crossfire because I didn't want to go buy the next faster card and waste the one I did buy so I got another one and ran it that way for a while and I hate going the SLI-Crossfire route because there always seems to be issues with some software that they don't work all that well and I like to keep things simple. I was mad which is why I added my dislike of the benchmark testing done here and just about everywhere else. And I'm not the only one that I know that has fallen into this trap either and I don't know that many people, that in it's self means a lot.
The only good you get out of these specialized cards is the OC potential which then exceeds MOST of the other cards in performance. And the cooling solution is GREAT for low noise environments. Now this should have been the kind of performance we should have gotten when the 7950 cards were first released. 
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and cost the same as selling my 5870's on ebay. 
, but on a point- performance numbers will always have variables whether they are .0001% or higher. What is posted is the average a user would get from such a system. I understand most don't read the entire review but it would be recommended to because system spec details, that is where the variables come in I recall the test bed was a core i7 920 but it switched to a core i7 2600 several months back.