I would suggest Tom's Hardware talk to a lawyer or a consumer association and ask them what is the legal status of a consumer that gets a Beta driver in the CD that accompanies the Graphics Card, or must use a hotfix driver for it to work, as opposed to a WHQL driver.
If the card fries (remember, driver problems like these can happen, as it happened to Nvidia a few months ago), and you're not using a WHQL driver, what rights do you have ? This is very dubious, especially given the legal definition of Beta and of Hotfix as the manufacturers say themselves.
I would strongly advise Tom's against recommending either HD6950 or 6970 for now, because that is exactly how they are. AMD released a card to the market with drivers that are not final, which I think is not only absurd, but an abuse on consumer's rights.
And they try to somewhat hide this reality, that is they haven't fully tested the drivers.
Look at the original disclaimer on the Catalyst 10.10e:
"Note! This hotfix is provided as is and is not supported by AMD. It has not completed full AMD testing and is only a driver update. "
(http://support.amd.com/us/kbarticles/Pages/gpu88-catalyst-10-10e-hotfix.aspx)
And they have always said this. But now, it's quite different for 10.12a:
"Note! This hotfix is provided “AS IS” in accordance with the End User License Agreement."
(http://support.amd.com/us/kbarticles/Pages/AMDCatalyst1012ahotfix.aspx )
Now you have to go read the fine print if you want to know what AMD previously told users and now wants to hide.
I, like many others here, don't like Nvidia's corporate behaviour from the last years, and have voiced it many times here. And I actually had some sympathy towards AMD, but this just proves that they just wanted to release the cards before Christmas, no matter the cost.
Very dubious behaviour. Even more dubious when you consider that they released Catalyst 10.12 one single day before the HD6950 and 6970 and those drivers do not have support for those cards. You have to resort to the Hotfix (10.12a) that came out two days later or the beta that came on the CD, whose legal status in protecting the consumer I question. Isn't this a very fishy release schedule ? I think it is.
At least Nvidia has a WHQL driver for both the GTX 570 and 580, I'll give them that!
I would only buy an HD69xx series when they have a WHQL driver. Making consumers free guinea pigs for a paid product (unlike, i.e., Windows 7 Beta, which was free) is not my notion of respecting the consumer. (And it's not about drivers always having bugs, they always have, that's not the point. It's: 1. a consumer protection legal point and 2. the fact that AMD states that they haven't fully tested the drivers themselves, which is just outright unnacceptable.)
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