Yep, that was pretty close to the time people started to flash their 6950s and the scare tactics began to try and keep people away from flashing the 6970 bios.
Now after almost a year and a half, it will be interesting to see how many people actually had problems or not.
Memory degraded on my "reference" 6950 modded to 6970. It only took a couple of days running 1475 MHz before it started to act weird.
In the past few days, because of this thread, tried the BIOSes again, card still has issues, but works fine with unlocked shaders and 6950 clocks. I say I tried the BIOSes again, as I found that differnet BIOSes clocked slightly differently, so I did try three different bioses.
In the end, I play BF3 more often than anything else, and the shader unlock barely makes any difference in performance, so I rarely even run the unlocked shader BIOS.
I chose the option "killed my card within two months", as that's the closest to my situation...but the card is definitely not dead yet.