yep it dead, best part is. i'm at a WoW LAN right now. GO ONBOARD!
Lol, well that's unfortunate. I guess I got lucky. I ended up getting two Gigabyte 6850s and at first I thought I might have a problem with one of them, but it was just a driver issue that was easily resolved after restarting my computer. They've been working great ever since, although for some reason Battlefield Bad Company 2 doesn't like them and will crash my computer after I've been playing for an hour or more.
I googled around about the problem too, and all I could see is that it's a problem that EA knows about but won't take the time to fix. It seems to be a glitch with crossfire, because it's not just the 6850 that has trouble with it. People were complaining with crossfired 5770s and 5870s too.
Hopefully there won't be any issues with Battlefield 3....