My card is softmodable, I will look to see what markings are on mine to help confirm any theories.
The unlocked pipes do not really translate into a large performance increase, expect for some synthetic
benchmarks. I believe overclocking the memory will produce the biggest performance gains.
As far as the PNY card from CompUSA's black friday sale, I took mine back even before I installed it.
I saw a resistor floating around in the box! I was unable to exchange it because they were out of
stock. I am know glad that deal didn't work out because I beleive this is a better deal. The BFG card
also seems to be a better card (comes with FarCry, the PNY card doesn't), and the lifetime warranty
doesn't hurt either. The only downside to the Best Buy deal is if you already own HL2. I didn't so it
worked great for me.
C Snyder