Quote Originally Posted by Hellobolis View Post
the tldr of the review i glanced at was basically: there aren't any significant performance differences, but the worst one was 12 dB louder than the best one so that's worth looking into.

considering how supply is atm i wouldn't worry overly much about the initial issues some of these cards have, good chance they will be solved by the time it's your turn to receive a card (aka probably next year).
It's been that way since Pascal. Reference board is sufficient to get the job done, plus there is a lot of limitations Nvidia puts up to segment the product stack and limit power consumption. But considering how the GPU Boost works better temperatures will directly influence the performance, so the good cooler still matters.