Hehe, glad I didn't wait to see the pricing of these and went ahead and got a X1900XT of the echo.
Looking at the specs on OCUK, that card looks awesome. Think a big "DON'T BUY" label has to be put on the picture though! I can see these selling quite well though... as someone said, remember the FX5200. They still sold, just cause they were DX9, even though everyone should have got a ti 4200 for the same kind of money! We don't need DX10 cards yet, but they will still sell.
Oh, and easy, I appreciate what you're saying about the ocing, but I'm pretty sure they still won't be that amazing even after the ocing.Oh, and heres the cooler they used:
Looks like a pretty beefy cooler. Mind you, 34C at idle is quite impressive after the volt mod! I'm sure you could take it at least to 1.4V with the stock cooler, and get a pretty healthy oc out of it.
The problem is though, the 128 bus is still gonna cripple it, no matter how fast you can get the card.Can't see it having much of lifespan for games either. Come on nvidia, release a 256-bit version, and everyone will be a lot happier, I'm sure! (unless maybe the G84 was such a bad design, they are just trying to cover up their mistakes by making everyone think the poor performance is due to the 128-bit bus!)