Great GPU!
by NiallAfter having this GPU for a little while now, I can safely say that I'm happy I went with it. Having a waterblock pre-installed on the GPU was the selling point for me personally, though I'm not let down by the hardware either. In terms of raster (standard rendering), the card performs incredibly well. Because of having HDR turned on, I play games in 4k at 60hz (this is my monitors maximum framerate for 4K HDR, HDR off would be 100hz) and so I have v-sync turned on and set to 60fps. AMD's driver software tells me that my average framerate is 56.3 - 56.8 fps across the games I play with settings maxed out - though I am sure the card could probably get higher FPS if I wasn't locking the framerate (or such is my assumption due to the nature of such a tight average FPS). (For reference, it's paired with a R9 5900X with SAM/ReBAR enabled) I have seen this card clock in at 3.1Ghz on the core clock, and despite being shared with the CPU with 2x360mm rads, the GPU never goes above 50c (CPU goes to 55c). So the game performance is great, the clock potential on it is great, energy efficiency can be improved if you know how to handle the software properly and are willing to cap framerates (and hopefully improved with drivers over time? Let's hope so!), and it runs cool. The downsides are that the lighting software is... extremely basic to say the least, though the upside to that is that the software seems to alter the bios of the card itself (or that's my guess) as whatever colour and pattern you set the LED's to? It'll remember that from the very instant you power up the PC to the very last second it's turned on. So props to them for not making us wait for the software to boot before returning to our choice! (Looking at you, Asus). One last thing to say: Pair this beast with a 1200w PSU. I was foolishly trying to run it on an 850w PSU for a few days (I had bad info) and when limiting the power draw, sure, it could handle it, but out of the box it had a terrible time. Ever since rebuilding my PC to include a 1200w PSU, it's been flawless. You CAN get away with a 1000w PSU, but you could easily be pushing the load to 950w with the right combination of CPU, drives, lights, fans, pump and so on. Best to play it safe.
