Hey man, i can back you up. When i installed 10.9, defaults went up to 400/900. They started back at 157/300. I dont OC my gfx cards. It was/is a driver issue, perhaps only affects crossfire set ups that way?
Honestly, I do not know, but I do know it's one of the things that I am looking to be "fixed" with these cards.
I'm not really too concerned with performance with these cards. I'm more focused on the outstanding issues that myself and many others are still left dealing with when using the 5-series cards.
5870 is a great card, performance-wise. i've not had a single issue since i sent my second card off for RMA...the idle clock thing is a bit frustrating, but not really an issue, as it solves flicker/artifacting issues. AND I really do think that THAT particular behavior, the new ULPS settings in driver, is what causes the cursor corruption.
See, thing is with many ASUS motherboards, the lower pci-e 16x slot is actually the main slot for dual vgas, but if you plug your monitor into the lower card, you don't get to see any image onscreen until windows boots and loads the vga driver. So the monitor gets plugged into the top card...the slave card...which gets the ULPS clocks of 157/300. The main card, the lower card, gets the 400/900 idle clocks...but doesn't have anything plugged into it, so that particular fix fails, and I'm stil left with cursor corruption, and flickering screens.
Why ASUS does that with the pci-e slots I do not know. I don't even know if that's the actual cause, but it could be...just one of the many possibilities that has come up over the last...damn..almost 13 months now.