took the plunge last night,it worked.
switched the card to slave Bios and flashed the version seen on this thread,page 12, so I am the owner of a FTW2 card now lol)
I have had the card for only 2 weeks and was only OCing from the master Bios, 2 things I confirmed was that I could now increase the power target to 130%, instead of 120% with the master BIOS
and the fan curve is more aggressive out of the box, read loud.
Funny thing though is that I can now lower the fan speed to 16% whereas it was lcoked at 56% with the FTW Hybrid master BIOS.not sure if it is related to a slave Bios feature or this FTW2 BIOS variant?
OCing wise, the new BIOS gave me a little more headroom. I could step up from the 12Ghz I was hitting with the FTW hybrid Bios to 12.4Ghz with that new one. its 200Mhz more than I could achieve with my ZOTAC Extreme+ so I was calling it a result
but obviously, effect on FPS increase is not massive, 1 fps gained in heaven benchmarks and a couple of avg fps in Project Cars2. temps remain quite comparable, around 50degC with Heaven and 47-48degC in PC2
was it worth it performance wise, yes maybe in some circumstances for example when I am south of 60FPS on my triple 1080p monitor set-up with some games maxed out and of course it is fun to run OCing
happy camper anyway, best 1080 card I have owned so far, even ahead of the ZOTAC and MSI GAMING X I had on both performances and noise/temps ratio