Hey

I see a lot of talk on these boards about the differences between the various ATI chipsets (6990, 5970 etc.) but very little about the various models by different manufacturers, even though there are large price differences between these.

For example, here is a three way comparison between the gigabyte, MSI and HIS versions of the 5870. I suppose miners would be overclocking their gpu's themselves so the clock speeds are irrelevant, but are there any other advantages from buying a more expensive version of this card, or just buy the cheapest 5870 gpu you can find?

The more expensive cards can provide certain over clocking advantages, such as a custom cooler, binned gpus, better ram cooling and low heat peripheral components. In general, you can expect low-end proprietary builds to not offer voltage modification, and reference designs usually have gpu voltage control at least.