You...changed them out for the same card?
You know that most all of those are reference boards, right? There's very little difference between them, if any at all.
MSI Afterburner is a good program to overclock with. It's pretty simple to do...just keep inching the frequencies up a bit and playing something like Crysis or Metro to see if it's stable. Once you start seeing artifacts or other errors, then back off a bit. you can also use MSI Kombustor, which comes with afterburner, but it's basically the same as Furmark and creates unrealistically high loads on your GPU. If you have voltage control, you can inch that up as well to get a bit more out of it, but be careful with that...
especially if you've unlocked it to a 6970.
Frame buffer size isn't your problem here, btw...2GB is plenty.