I'm tempted to get a few of these but with Maxwell probably just 6-8 months away I'm finding it hard to justify. NVidia knows how to tease us

I don't have a 'farm' but do need to replace an old power hungry and loud reference GTX480. Not just the power and noise, I've had to RMA it 2 times now. Once was my fault - I was adjusting fan clips on CPU cooler and slipped while power was on. The clip sprung out of my hand and crossed a couple of power pins on the board right at the PCI power connectors - doh! The other time is would not run anything without a crash, and I'm not just talking just on GPUGrid, any other project or benchmark ... basically put a load on it and it crapped out. EVGA replaced it no questions but I was kind of hoping they would give me something a little newer and quieter.

I still have a dual card GTX295, which is what I started on GPUGrid with that. I don't run it anymore and while it too is hot and loud like the 480, it's a tank and ran for years without any problem, I just couldn't kill. With volts maxed and fan at 100%, it ran 90+C !!!

I've been spoiled by how cool and quite my non reference 660Ti and 670 run and I'll never go back to reference or dual GPU again. I'm thinking a 780Ti would increase my dailies nicely but I'll have to wait to see what the characteristics are on the non-ref cards turn out like.

Any indicators that Maxwell will bring a new architecture or do you think their first shot will be optimizations of their current line? Mixing a new fab node and architecture is risky but NVidia does like to push it and then fix it later.

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Thanks - Steve

Going by Nvidias roadmap, Maxwell looks to be a game changer but time will tell I guess.
Both my 295's failed after ~15months @ stock. Vowed I would never get a duallie again, though they were beasts when working.
I've had numerous failures of non-reference cards fans, mostly Gainward phantoms & XFX.