I bought this card to Water cool , refference cards have many choices of water blocks . You can't Water cool a model with a fan . I also have the fan model for my Daughters pc ! She loves the changeable fans . These cards play games on high settings at a great price !

I've always built my own PCs since I was a kid, I got sort of busy in the past 6 years though and let my PC slide... So here I was in 2017 with a XFX 7770 from 2012 transplanted into a newer rig (6 core AMD FX 3.9GHz + 16GB RAM) and a new copy of Titanfall 2 thinking i was still going to be "ok". This was not the case. If you're planning on gaming; your rig is only as good as your gfx card. Titanfall 2 barely managed to run if even at all. Fast forward to me frantically researching gfx cards to find myself at a crossroads between a Nvidia GTX 1070 and the AMD RX 480 8GB. Honestly, it came down to the price and my needs. The whole reason for all the backstory is that I was running a 5 year old gfx card in my system until finally upgrading it now. You can get a loooooong time out of a gfx card if you aren't hardcore into gaming. Considering that, if you just want to get in to current available games and and do so with nearly maxed out settings while keeping a "relative" budget.... this is the card you want. If you don't care about your budget? Honestly, at least take a peek at the GTX 1070 you'd probably be a bit ahead in the performance department. I'm estimating a 4 year run out of this card unless VR really takes off in the next year or 2... then make it a 2 year run. Noteworthy items: Not the quietest, but not the loudest either. Make sure you keep it clean! it just has a single turbine. Looks nice in the case, not gaudy. It runs the HTC Vive with ZERO issue. Only 1 HDMI, the rest are Displayports (3 total) Sorry to be wordy, but I hope this helps a few of you!

Finally found an AMD card that, performance wise,can keep up with the nvidia crowd. I read before purchase, and have found to be true in real life, that this card outperforms my old, by nine months, GTX 970, and at a pretty good size drop in price. I was , at first, a bit leary of the stock cooler setup, but have not run into any problems, not even close. Then there's the custom back plate. If you are thinking evga or similar, forget it, this thing is thick, say twice the thickness of the evga piece I put on the 970 to keep it from bowing when I liquid cooled it. The price on these makes another Cross Fire experiment for me imminent. Oh, and this card is pretty quiet, but I'm used to the two fan ACX or the extra radiator and fans of my last project.

PROS: - Best Polaris GPU available - Runs most AAA games at max settings @ 1080p, mixed settings at 1440p - Backplate helps hide the solder points CONS: - Cooler is sub-par, resulting in louder operation to keep temps reasonable OTHER THOUGHTS: In order to get the most out of this card, you should go into Radeon Software and adjust power and temperature limits in Wattman

this card runs slightly hot under a heavy load, however it keeps up with all of the latest games and can run 60 fps -130 fps smoothly