At the time of writing this, it's still the fastest card on the market (at least that I could find within my research, which was fairly extensive). Everything about this card is perfect except two things:



1. It's HEAVY!

Being almost 13 inches long and 2.5 slots wide, it is quite hefty. Luckily my PC's motherboard has metal armor on the PCI slots, which I think without, the slot might break and drop the card, it currently (with the PC 90 degrees upright) hangs downward at about a 10-15 degree angle, very noticeable when looked at directly from the side. I'm considering soon buying a bolster to hold it upright. Being a reasonably paranoid person about a $700-$850 card depending on where you get it (personally spent ~$900 for the card and express shipping), I don't think I'm too paranoid to believe it might just fall off the PCI slot one day because 'why not'...



2. It's NOT for overclocking.

The only thing I haven't done with this is try to liquid cool it, but it already has a very beefy cooler with 3 decent sized fans. I simply cannot overclock this card past ~2100 MHz without complete system instability. I can run most things effectively as high as ~2030 MHz. However, running intense games such as: The Witcher 3, Far Cry Primal, GTA V, or Fallout 4 (mind you I put these all at Fullscreen, 3840x2160 (4K), completely maxed settings), without total instability or just immediate game crashes. To run any of these games with NO instability, it's best to leave it at whatever stock clock the card comes at (mine came at ~1980, though the specifications read 1911). If you don't mind an occasional texture flicker (talking about 1 screen glitch every ~5 minutes) I could keep my card JUST below 2 GHz, though at that level some games still experienced higher instability (especially The Witcher 3, likely because of it's use of lots of NVIDIA's special effects like HairWorks).



3. I know I said two, but this one isn't actually a problem, just a personal adjustment that some consumers are interested in and is limited here...

COLOR! This card does flaunt it's "Spectra" lighting from which you might expect a whopping 16 million or even a full 1 billion+ colors for absolute spectral colors. Instead it offers only the basic kindergarten rainbow colors, red, yellow, green, light blue, navy-ish blue, pink/magenta, and white.

Perhaps the only special part of this cards colors is that you can change the intensity of the lighting, so you can make it dimmer or brighter.

That's the only thing my Corsair M65 Pro RGB mouse can't do, but at least it has over 7 colors.

Again this is totally up to the user, my PC currently flaunts a red and blue LED mixture, so the blue and red colors work just fine for me.



Besides weight and inability to overclock, and basic coloring, this card is pure amazement. I'm able to run GTA V at totally maxed settings at 4K with 60 fps, not a lot of cards can. I'm also able to run a stable game of The Witcher 3 (again fully maximized, 4K) averaging 45 fps, reaching 60 fps (my monitor cap) and only dropping as low as 25 during extremely intensively graphic scenes.



Even when playing these intense games, the card has never gone above 77 degrees Celsius on me, granted I sit in the hottest room in my home (ambient temperature ~18C on a cool night with the windows open, and up to ~30C on a hot day, averages ~28C).



I don't know if it's just my luck or the game's lack of optimization, but Assassin's Creed: Syndicate can only run at ~40 fps in 1080p, mid-high settings. I haven't tried reinstalling the game, and that may be all it needs, but what little game-play I have in the story is so boring I'm just not interested, but that's for a different review.



I do want to mention that the overclocking issue may not be an issue for all consumers, having a card running at just under 2 GHz straight out of the box is a major wow factor, and many people may not even consider trying to overclock that to higher. But if you are an absolute enthusiast not too unlike myself, and you want every drip and drop the newest hardware can provide, stray from this card; I might even suggest that you save another $500 and just buy one of those new shiny Titan X's (the pascal version of course).



My complete system specs:

i7-6700K (overclocked to 4.4GHz, sitting under a Corsair H100i AIO Liquid cooler)

16 GB 3200MHz Patriot Viper RAM

MSI Gaming M7 Mobo

Thermaltake TR2 RX 850W PSU

1TB 850 EVO SSD & 512GB 950 Pro M.2 SSD (Samsung)

Windows 10

and obviously... a ZOTAC 1080 AMP! Extreme

All of this sits inside a Thermaltake Core X71 case, with mind you, -->plenty<-- of fans.

(Your personal experience with this card may be better or worse depending on the rest of your computer's specifications)