I just got this card monday and installed on a fresh os \ windows 7 ultimate
with the latest drivers and ccc, (11.5) anyway coming from nvidia i don't know whether this is normal for ati drivers to date or whether its my card but i have bad screen tearing from the moment i boot into windows i can see the tearing, i get it in videos and games although v sync helps out in games and i enabled v sync in ccc which helps with videos but there's still random times where nothing can be done.
Another app is heaven i ran a bench and it just tears like crazy and if i enable v sync in heaven the performance takes a big hit, Id say it knocks off around 5\10 fps.
Every things update and installed correctly as it should be and i just really want to know if its the drivers that are crud and if anyone else is experiencing this?

Can't really help. other than to tell you this isn't normal. I'm a long time ATi user and have never seen that.

All I could suggest is to reinstall the driver and if it is still doing look into the driver settings and see if you can find anything there. Sounds like maybe a refresh rate issue? You also might check some of your monitor settings.

I have a reference 689 and haven't experienced anything like that.