Pros: Looks nice. Stays cool. Runs quiet.

Cons: Have had hell with this since day one. I bought it to replace an aging NVidia 8800GT (which ran flawlessly for years playing all games I threw at it) to get some extra FPS and DX11. Well, I got the DX11, but that's about it. Constant blue screens and driver crashes ever since installing it. I thought it maybe other hardware issues, so I tested RAM with Memtest86 for 12 hrs, stress tested processor and RAM with HyperPi for a whole day, tested my SSD with Atto disk benchmark for 8 hours and received no errors on any (system has been rock solid since I built it, never had a single problem with it in 5 years until I installed this card. I tried clean Windows 7 x64 install, every graphics driver since 12.8 to 13.1 Beta 7 and updated the card and mobo bios. I even replaced my excellent 750 watt power supply with a brand new Corsair AX850 just to be sure it wasn't a power issue. Nothing will fix this horrible piece of equipment. Another thing to note is this thing takes eons just to load any textures to its flaky memory, resulting in 1 minute load times for maps on Black Ops 2 multiplayer, where the card slows down to 1FPS and ramps itself up to 100% load and makes gameplay extremely choppy for the first 10 secs to 1 minute (it's getting worse over time). Map load times with my 8800GT were approx 5-10 seconds. load times make it impossible to play any S&D in BO2or MW3, due to always missing the first round due to it taking so long to load textures. BF4 is almost impossible to play. When it's loading a map it will get itself stuck in a loop when loading textures and the audio will stick in a loop too. Half the time it errors out on loading multiplayer maps and I get kicked due to this looping. It does it in game too, on the rare occasion I can get it to load,(multiplayer and single) which is like lag x10000. I'm convinced it is bad RAM on the board (I'm at default speeds BTW, but it's worse if you try to under/overclock the card) because it will take an age (30 secs or so)to load 18mb (yes, megabytes) of texture to its memory to run a ram test in MSI Kombustor, but has no problems loading any GPU heavy stuff. There is also a whole bunch of graphical stuttering when any of the Kombustor tests are loaded and running (along with lots of graphical anomalies in most games) The card doesn't get over 60*c in stress tests, so heat isn't the issue. Voltage overclocks of any kind have not made it stable either. I have had none of the same problems when I reinstalled my 8800GT (though frame rates are slower for obvious reasons). My 8800GT will even load BF4!

Overall Review: I wouldn't normally have even bothered writing this review, being that this thing has been such a nightmare, and to top it off and push me over the edge is the fact that the Gigabyte tech support is the worst I have ever dealt with in 15 years of PC building. Waiting 2 full days for a response to a tech support question is just ridiculous. This is the last time I will ever buy a Gigabyte product. It's pretty obvious there are known problems with a big chunk of these cards if you look on the Internet. AMD have even acknowledged a huge problem With these chips. Gigabyte has already stopped supporting the card properly (drivers and BIOS) and has pulled it from its product line up. That speaks volumes to me. Now I have to RMA this thing and it will probably be replaced with another defective piece of headache equipment. I see an internet auction and a new NVidia card in my very near future.

Pros: Looks really good, simple to use.

Cons: After just over a year of use, the blue led's that display temperature are only visible in total darkness and even then are barely readable. The green led's that display fan speed are seriously dimmed but still readable in ambient light. Also, one of the rather cheesy speed control knobs has come loose and seems to work only when it feels like it.