ah i see. i agree it can be a pain in the ass at times

You're welcome. The most objective measure I have found is flying a Spitfire through the Tower bridge in the London sightseeing scenario. My rig runs between 27 and 33 FPS depending on head movement using trackIR. It looks very smooth... like a film. During gameplay, FPS is 50-60 with Vsync ON.

I have also settled on a stable overclock using EVGA Precision X hardware monitor software (Provided): Power target 106%; Temp Target 94c; GPU clock +200MHz; Mem clock +250MHz. Higher clock offsets will crash my video driver (With successful auto recovery each time).

The temperatures are very well controlled and the fan is quiet. 3DMark11 score 11989 with graphics score 14902. (25% increase over 2 Xfired HD 6970's)