Communism is right about the XFX. They made a great card until they decided to thermal tape the VRMs to the plastic frame instead of a heatsink. It's so dumb.
For my vote, the MSI, Gigabyte, and Sapphire are all in the same ballpark as far as expected quality. I have the Gigabyte and it's been flawless. It does use 3x 75mm fans though, which means they need to spin faster to move the same air as a bigger fan. The Sapphire uses 3x 85mm and the MSI 2x 100mm. If you want uber silence the Windforce might be a touch loud. I have mine in a Fractal Design Define R4, which has a lot of sound deadening, and I can hear it through the case. The card does stay really cool though in the performance BIOS setting.
Communism's card was defective most likely. He's lucky it blew so early is my take on it.
I won't argue that the DD's vrm cooling is inferior to the ref or TriX design at all.
I was playing around today with both my rigs in the picture. My DD rig currently has no games installed so was stuck with Valley benchmark to compare temps.
I fired up valley benchmark on both rigs and let it loop for 45 minutes before I clicked the benchmark runs. I only did three benchmark runs on both cards but figured the cards would be warmed up enough before.
I decided to run the DD at the same clocks as the TriX just to see what would happen.
End results:
Max VRM 1 temps
TriX 68c
DD 82c
Conclusion the TriX temps are great....The DD gets a bad wrap but isn't as bad as some say.
Too be a fare comparison I really should have taken my rigs into the garage and blown out the dust from both cards. If I remember correctly the TriX was blown out last, the DD looks to have tighter fins and both are a little dusty currently....Added to my to do list.
The vrm temps on the DD did seem to improve with use. Maybe the design needs a good burn in....Mining seemed like the best option to me at the time and made me some $'s also.