I bought this GPU to upgrade an MSI 270x, which in it's own right was a phenomenal card for it's price and has lasted me very well over the past few years. It was however getting increasingly noisy with the greater burden of newer games and wasn't quite right for the Silverstone FT03 case in which it resided (because of the peculiar case layout, blower-style coolers are far better suited than conventional down-thrust coolers). My system is based around an i5 6600 with 16gb of DDR4 RAM and a 1080 monitor. The 8gb VRAM is, frankly, overkill for 1080p gaming, though I'm hoping to get a better monitor at some future point.



I was deliberating between this and the nvidia 1060, but team red won out because of the marginally better DX12 performance and the fact that (in my experience with the 270x) AMD has had an excellent track record of releasing timely patches for new game releases; as such I fully expect the relative performance to improve as new drivers are released.



The new AMD drivers for this card are substantial, featuring in-depth options for tinkering with every aspect of this graphics card according to temperature and workload. I put it through it's paces with a few hours of Fallout 4 and a number of games of Overwatch (both on maximum settings) and found both to run absolutely perfectly - barely dipping below 60fps. It's remarkably quiet (with a blower cooler at that!) and the temperature remains reasonably stable around 75C with default settings, though I will probably tinker with the controls to ensure it's keeping at a more tepid 60C.