I'll be honest, I solely bought this card over a EVGA SSC or an MSI card because I was too impatient to wait several days for shipping when BestBuy had this one in stock. The common things you will read when looking at reviews for the GTX 970 Stock Reference design are "it sucks compared to non-reference cards" and reviews like that. I'm here to tell you I'm shocked by how well this card performed. Ran benchmarks with maximum settings at 1080p in 3DMark Firestrike and Unigine Heaven. Even after several hours of heavily modded Skyrim at max settings and video rendering, even when the card was at 100% usage, it never exceeded 67 degrees Celsius. I am also not much of an overclocker, and I have not yet even tried to self-overclock this card, but the card had a boost clock of 1387 MHz, that's higher than the "factory overclock" of the EVGA For The Win Plus edition GTX 970... Performance? 10/10 for the price, even if it is a bit more expensive than many of the others. Skyrim with over 100 mods at max settings 1080p never went below 45 FPS and was at 60 or above 95% of the time. In Unigine Heaven at 1080p with tessellation at max, graphics on ultra, 16x AA, and 8x MSAA it averaged about 52 FPS with a minimum of 21 FPS in a couple small instances that lasted a fraction of a second that I could not even notice, and a max of about 120 FPS. In Firestrike by 3DMark it averaged about 40 FPS, with a min of 25 and a max of 70 (the lower FPS was due to my processor being a non-overclocked FX 6300, my cooler isn't good enough for overclocking it very far, but planning on upgrading in a few weeks.) Looks? 10/10 again. The reference cooler is by far the nicest in every way. The large green Geforce GTX logo on the side lights up in bright neon green that looks amazing in a case even if the colors don't match (my fans are red.) Heat and Power? 9/10, only ever tapped 70 degrees C once for a very short period of time in 3DMark Firestrike. Power usage is very efficient, but my 750w gold PSU from Corsair can take it even if it wasn't very efficient. Noise? 7/10, if you're like me and use high-quality headphones that really block out outside noise well then the fan's noise isn't noticeable even at 100% speed, however if you plan to use speakers or cheap headphones with this card the fan may be a little noisy for your liking. I will say though, only get this card if you plan to play AAA games with max settings on 1080p, this card is not sufficient for 4K gaming with most games (you'll need a 980ti for that) and 1440p gaming with some games (you'll need a regular 980 for that), and it's way overkill for games like TF2, CSGO (unless you want to play at maximum settings at 144 hz), or Minecraft. Seriously, bugs the heck out of me whenever a rich 12 year old gets a computer with a GTX 970 and an i7 processor just to play minecraft without even putting on shaders... Not to mention it comes with Tom Clancy's The Division for free, the game has bugs but any game that's free is a good game to me. TL;DR: Don't believe the reviews saying the reference sucks, I'm beating the factory overclocks of all of the non-reference GTX 970s and I haven't even touched afterburner yet, and at a comfortable 55-65 degrees Celsius! ---Notes for the Unigine Heaven benchmark screenshot--- Graphics: Ultra Resolution: 1080p Fullscreen: Yes Tessellation: Extreme (max) Anti-Aliasing: 8x (16x is overkill and hurts performance no matter the card) Average FPS: 52.7 Min FPS: 16.4 (Only achieved twice for a 1-2 frame duration, caused by processor, almost unnoticeable.) Max FPS: 115.8 CPU: AMD FX-6300 Six-Core Processor @3.5 GHz GPU: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970 4GB DDR5 (reference model) RAM: 8 GB Corsair Vengence @1600 MHz Note the info in the top right corner. Notice that the Graphics speed (core clock) is almost 1400 MHz, without me ever overclocking it. And note the temperature is at 62 degrees Celsius even after the benchmark completed after I re-ran it 5 times after doing 3 runs of 3DMark.