The artifacting that some people experienced was coming from the vram. I've handled five 280x cards now and never experienced it, but if you do all you have to do is get MSI afterburner and create a new fan map to kick the fans on earlier and keep temps a little lower. Seriously, you CANNOT beat this card in price/performance. I'm not some fanboy, either. I run 780 ti's in my rig, but with all the people dumping their old mining rig hardware which is primarily R9 gear, their prices have been driven unreasonably low.