There's still something to be said for brute force, and ATI seems like they simply won't even use aggressive clock speeds even if they have very efficient architectures to begin with. Considering how competitive a 9800XT would be if it had 450Mhz RAM (a 85Mhz bump, and it would be competitive in that it would win just about everything), I'm not a big fan of ATI's conservative nature in that department. Sure, a lot of it is to appease OEMs, but the idea of a R420 clocked at 550/1200 or something crazy like that makes my mouth water, as I'm sure it does to a lot of other people in the enthusiast crowd.