_Check my edit at the bottom of this msg_
Actually, these engineering samples are clocked lower than the boxed versions. I was reading about them in a thread on the For Sale/Trade board yesterday and on rage3d a while a back.
You may get lucky and get a "good" engineering sample which will have the 5.5ns DDR which means it can do 183core/183mem no problem. 183/183 is stock for 64mb retail. But, I heard that alot of these were early samples with only 6ns DDR though, or were still being tweaked which means they may never get up as high as their retail counterparts.
I myself, am not going to go without the warranty and prefer a non-used sample so I ordered a retail 32mb. Also keep in mind what someone said above. Alot of people buy the 64mb for the VIVO modules and these samples more than likely do not have them. The extra 32mb may make a difference at higher resolutions, but just as the 64mb GF2 was not a very big increase over the 32mb GF2, the 64mb is not going to perform significantly better.
With all that said, I think this is a good deal for those wacky canadians, since as they pointed out, availability is not as good there as here. Plus the hassle and extra cost of customs if they want something from here in the US.
[edit]According to
this thread by one of the people that snatched up a bunch, most of them do in fact have 6ns memory on these cards. That means that most are clocked by default at 166/166 like the 32mb retail version. But, unlike the retail 32mb which have 5.5ns DDR, it can not be as easily overclocked. The 32mb retail can hit 183/183 pretty easily and has been known to go higher (200/200) with better cooling. The 64mb versions with 6ns will probably top out around 175-180. Also, again there hasnt been a clear answer but it looks like this batch doesn't have the VIVO module.[/edit]