I decided to upgrade from a reference Sapphire R9 290 after buying a 1440p monitor and watching my games all fall below max settings. I was not pleased. Initially, I'd thought about getting a second 290 to crossfire but my research told me that a single-card setup was always a better option, and the 4GB of RAM with the 290 is a little lower than I'd be comfortable with running games at higher resolutions. I was lucky enough to find this card at its lowest recorded price on Amazon (639.99) so I decided to list my 290 on ebay and go for this beast. My girlfriend is not pleased with me.



So far, this has knocked all my games out of the park. Since resolving some driver issues (the drivers the Nvidia website told me to download were way behind, updating through Windows Update helped resolve that), I've been absolutely loving the card. Maxes most everything comfortably at 1440p with nothing more than the factory overclock; the card is a beast. Only game it's struggled marginally with that I play regularly is Witcher 3, but it mostly only has issues while HairWorks is on; after doing some last minute panic research (as if I'd bought the wrong card for my needs) there's basically no single graphics setup in existence that deals with HairWorks well. Aside from that: very rarely during ingame storms and/or in crowded areas the FPS will drop to low/mid 50s but usually only for a few seconds until the fan catches up. For the most part, I can play the game perfectly at all times. Maxing Shadow of Mordor was a struggle on my old R9 290, and this card handles it beautifully with room to spare. Pretty much devours BF4 and other shooters I've thrown at it.



Side note: I play Guild Wars 2 off and on. A word of advice for other players there: if you're looking for a setup that can max that game at 1440p/60fps in crowded areas, you're wasting your time. I have my 3570k overclocked to 4.3GHz (on water) and with this card, the GPU/CPU usage never reaches 100% despite my FPS being around 45 so I don't know if there's a solution in existence that will run that game perfectly.



Most importantly, this card is QUIET. I may have some bias because I'm coming off an R9 290, which is a notoriously loud card, but it's really great that I can play beautiful games without having to hear the whirring of my GPU fan in the background. I don't like playing with headphones so this card's quiet cooling system is a treat for my bleeding ears. And even though it's quiet, it's still effective. I haven't gone above the stock temp target (82c) and the fan pretty much never goes above 50% speeds even with consistent 100% GPU load.



Concisely,

PROS:

* Exceptionally quiet

* Knocks 1440p games out of the park

* Stays within reasonable temp ranges even at only 50ish% fan usage at full load.



CONS:

* Size. The card is quite large and the power connector cords had to be maneuvered in such a way that they wouldn't interfere with my side exhaust fan. And this is in a full-tower case (CoolerMaster HAF 932).

* I'm pretty finicky about my FPS, so it's mildly disappointing that this is pretty much the best single card you can buy (who wants to pay twice as much for marginal FPS game to get the Titan X)

* Doesn't make me better at Rocket League



The price is really not all that bad considering the performance you get, and AMD has been slacking for a few releases now so I'd highly recommend this card if you're looking at handling 2k+ gaming. I'm looking forward to seeing what other games I'll be able to max in the future using this card.