Great performer, but bulky and odd power requirements.

Upgrading from a GTX 860 Ti, the first thing I notice is that I never heard the fan. I ran several benchmarks and the performance was outstanding. I put this in a Dell T3500 workstation, so right off the bat, I noticed that I didn't have the right power connectors. For some reason, they decided that two 150 Watt connectors weren't enough, so there is a six pin AND an eight-pin connector. This isn't the same 8-pin connector as a CPU, though, so you're probably going to have to buy an adapter to hook it to some other supply rail in your PS (which I did). The next thing I notice is that it's big. Oversized. The fans are big, which is great, because bigger fans are quieter, and these fans are very quiet. The fans don't even come on until the card is under load. What's not so great is that the card sticks up well above the top of the card retention bracket. The heat pipes stick up even farther. As a result, I could only run it with the computer half disassembled, because there just wasn't enough room. Dell has designed their workstations with standard-sized cards in mind, and the bulk of this one prevented me from lower the card-retaining bracket and from latching the hard drive carrier. I re-sold this card on Ebay and bought a Zotac GTX970, which is a normal-sized card with two 6-pin power connectors as god intended. Its fans are not as big, but it's still quiet (it controls the fans individually, alternating them to keep the noise down). So if you've got the room for it, the MSI is a great card. Just be aware that it's taller than a standard card.Read full review

Verified purchase: Yes | Condition: Pre-owned