You make some very good points here. But as Happy has pointed out, there's something bigger going on than just AIBs making changes to products to lower the price. It's AMD/Nvidia establishing product lines and not sticking to them. If the 6670 is going to be offered with GDDR5 and DDR3, then at the very least, every review site should be told that on launch day, and every reviewer should have the option of testing both products.
Pretty sure that's a non-reference card something like HD 5870 Vapor-X. So AMD doesn't control if it gets DDR3 or GDDR5, they already have their reference design and that's what got reviewed.
In my opinion, an HD6670 with DDR3 is not an HD6670. Why? Because it wasn't mentioned in the Anandtech review:
http://www.anandtech.com/show/4278/amds-radeon-hd-6670-radeon-hd-6570
In fact, that very review discusses GDDR5 versus DDR3, but in the context of other cards - the 5570/6570. Here's what it says:
"The original 5570 and the one we continue to test today launched with DDR3 memory. AMD did introduce a GDDR5 variant in the summer of 2010, but it never gained much traction. So compared to the 5570, the GDDR5 6570 with its 1GHz (4GHz data rate) GDDR5 has 222% the memory bandwidth of the DDR3 5570 and its 900MHz (1.8GHz data rate) RAM. Now theres a catch in all of this: similar to how the 5570 ended up,
AMD will be launching cards with both GDDR5 and DDR3.
The GDDR5 cards like the one were reviewing today will come with 512MB of RAM, while the DDR3 cards will come with 1GB of RAM. The extra RAM has its advantages in some edge cases, but our advice always has been and remains to be that
you should pick the GDDR5 versions of most video cards over the (G)DDR3 versions. The only notable downside to the GDDR5 card in this case is that GDDR5s power consumption is much higher, which is why the GDDR5 6570 is a 60W card while the DDR3 6570 is 44W."
Now what's the problem with this? The HD6570 GDDR5 was never produced. Either Ryan Smith was lying when he wrote this, or he was duped. I have a feeling it was the latter.
And that, my friends, is the fault of AMD, not Ryan Smith, not the OP, not you or me. And that gets to the heart of the problem. AMD is shifting around (or allowing others to shift around) its product lines after launch.
Irrelevant to the OP but OK. As for the shifting around comment, they have been doing this for years. For example the ROG series of cards, the Lightning series by MSi etc.
If I wanted to save money by buying a cheaper card than the HD6670 GDDR5, by all means I should be able to do that. I'll buy the HD6570 or HD6450. That's why there are multi-tiered product lines in this industry. It's not like a car where you can get it equipped with a V6 or V8. We're buying the darn engine here, so we better get the engine that was advertised and reviewed.
The GPU is still a 6670. XFX can't make up a product "tier" or name for AMD.