I found some news on a GTX295 variant designed to have better performance without overclocking:

http://www.techpowerup.com/95445/ASUS_Designes_Own_Monster_Dual-GTX_285_4_GB_Graphics_Card.html

I didn't see anything on whether more than a limited number of them were planned, though.

Really really old news though.

They've been out for ages. :)

Basically the typical GTX 295 uses two sets of GTX275 with speeds set to that of a GTX 260 sp216 (GT200b), while the Asus GTX295 variant uses two GTX 285 cores, with GTX 285 speeds:
For GPUGrid crunchers the main differences are the 12.5% higher Core Clock Rates, 18% higher Shader clocks and features allowing for improved tweak-ability.
The extra RAM is irrelevant for crunching, as is quad sli.
Standard GTX 295; 576MHz Core, 1242MHz Shaders.
Asus GTX 295; 648MHz Core, 1476MHz Shaders.

Still the top card, for a few more weeks.

Never ever saw one for retail sale.
There were heated arguments in the overclocking competition communities as Asus only make this available to a few teams who they were supporting. Asus only advertised them because the rules in some of the competitions said you had to start with commercially available equipment. The rumor when they were originally announced was that they would be seling for about $1000 USD!!! Even if could have found one the proce was far away from reasoable that it was only going to be the crazy OCing MFers (love those guys) that would have bought them anyway.

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Thanks - Steve

Asus may also have been flexing their muscles with NVidia. Either NVidia take one of their top customers to court over rebuilding NVidia technology, a lose-lose battle for sure, or they will have set precedence and be free to do it again. A difficult situation for NVidia saying as they sell chips to motherboard manufacturers too. Perhaps they negotiated so that manufacturing was limited, and they could maintain a respectable relationship.
It does not really matter how expensive they are, some mugs will buy them just because they are the top card. Both Manufacturer and buyer want to be labelled as makers or owners of the Fastest Card.