There were a few things about this card that caught my eye.
1. it was only $160
2. It's on par with the GTX260 (Nvidia) as far as specs/price
3. it supported DX11 which the GTX260 didn't
Normally I would go with the Nvidia cards since I always had good luck with them. ATI, well 13something years back the drivers sucked and caused crashes and that left a bad taste. I took a chance they changed.
After thoughts:
The card is a solid performer. It lives up to the specs (as expected) but the drivers are, well lacking. First thing that got me was the monitor. I still have a very nice CRT (1920x1680 @ 75) and the card didn't read the DDC correctly unlike my 7950 card. It was locked at 60hz for all ranges. I searched online (now that I know about this) and found this was a wider issue for the latest drivers. The easiest fix I found was to create a monitor driver, sigh.... Given that NEC doesnt give these out (and why should they when it's built into the monitor) i found a bunch of tools so that I can input the timings and create a driver. After a few tries I did manage to get the refresh back up to 85hz but have another issue (which is also known to all ati cards after searching) of the monitor not going into standby mode. The second one isn't much of an issue at the moment as a supposed patch is being developed and this computer is primarily my gaming/photo computer and power-on only when needed. A workaround is to instead of monitor off just put the entire computer into standby :)
In conclusion I probably would go with Nvidia again, after this card gets old, for the *insert 2-digit number* next
