I bought 2 of these for SLI to replace the GTX 560's I've been using. The first thing I noticed Is how much less power these require compared to the 500's (The 560's needed 2 PCI-E connectors per card where these only require 1 per card). These cards a quite bulky but the main reason for this is cooling; which It does extremely well (FurMark burn-in over 15 minutes didn't get either of the cores above 68°C).
Over-clocking the cards Is rather easy with several pieces of software (My personal favourite Is MSI Afterburner for the Logitech keyboard plug-In customisation) and within 5 minutes you can have the cards tweaked to give better performance than a stock GTX 660ti.
Even at stock speeds 2 of these In SLI are more than enough to run Crysis 3 on Very High (Except AA which was set to MSAA 4X) @ 1920 x 1080 with a smooth 60 FPS. Other games I've tested are Metro 2033, Tomb Raider (The reboot), Arkham City, Far Cry 3, Black Ops 2 and Skyrim. All were set to max settings with the exception of AA which I set to MSAA 4x or similar dependant on the options available. The only one to drop below 60 FPS was Tomb Raider but that Is down to the SLI profile requiring fine tuning from Nvidia. To run any of these games with max AA you would need to spend around £1000 more.
So why a 4 star rating? The packaging! Usually expensive graphics cards (£180 per card) come with lots of padding to ensure they are protected from the clumsy delivery boy, these cards were protected by a piece of folded up cardboard and a plastic film stretched around the card to hold It In place. My cards weren't damaged when they arrived but anyone unlucky enough to have a delivery boy that couldn't care less may not be so fortunate.
Overall these cards are brilliant. They are cheaper than the AMD alternatives, fantastic performance per £ and look nice too.
Be wary though, at 40cm long these cards take up quite a chunk of space.
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