Card does have memory chips on the backside, but for every-day gaming and F @ H use, I cannot see spending $20+ for a backplate when most games & F @ H don't really stress the GPU RAM, or gain much if any performance from overclocking it. Now if I were only going for highest possible benchmark scores, it might help achieve that, but not my cup of tea.
I must say that as far as performance goes, I'm blown away!!! So far it has handled all my games at 2560x1600 with maxed out quality settings. I haven't seen a frame rate below 38fps (Tomb Raider with the ATI TressFX hair thingy turned on), but I haven't reinstalled Metro 2033 yet which should finish downloading from Steam any minute now.
Quite pleased with folding performance as well, using only 20W more power than my old 660Ti, this card is putting out more than double the PPD. Where the 660Ti topped out around 101,000 PPD, this card gets between 220,000 and 320,000 PPD depending on WU.
Still, I almost returned this card for refund. This was the first time in over 5 years that I could hear my computer (which is in the living room), from my bedroom. Not just hear it though, it actually kept me from sleeping very well on night #1.
This friggin card was just plain LOUD.
I had considered water cooling the card, but the voltage regulators are in a very bad location & would not receive ANY cooling from the water cooling adapter
Luckily I figured out that it was PrecisionX that was the root of that loudness problem. Even at default setting, it was keeping the card at about 62C, but in order to do that, it had to push the fans to 78 - 80% fan speed, or about 3,300 - 3,400RPM. PrecisionX was causing FarCry4 to crash every time as it tried to load, so I ended up removing PrecisionX & instantly, the hair-dryer on steroids turned into a quiet hum. Down-side, GPU folds around 72C, but with fan speed around 27% or about 1,200RPM, it is no longer headache inducing loud. I hate a loud PC which is actually why my last 3 video cards were all from Gigabyte, huge fans that never got loud (even at 100% fan speed) & cooled very well, untill they stopped working...
I do hate that this card runs at about 72C when folding, but as long as it remains quiet, I'll just live with it & watch the finished WU's pile up