Rant:

I built a PC for a friend of mine recently and got a bundle CPU motherboard and GPU (5600x3D microcenter exclusive at the time). I had so many problems with the Phantom Gaming 6600xt at the time. The machine would boot inconsistently. I went back to microcenter and returned the card after reading that the sapphire 6750xt didn't have the same problems and swapped up to a sapphire.

This week I just bought a Radeon 7800 XT steel legend for 480$ USD. It was smaller and cheaper than comparable products. The card has the worst coil whine I ever heard and performed poorly. I assume I paid the price for not going for something like the sapphire nitro+. I went and swapped it out (at microcenter). 7800xt nitro+ is a much better card, does not whine and works as expected.

This may be related to the AMD/Radeon products...

I have a 3080ti from MSI that is a huge RGB glowing monstrosity in one rig and a dell 3090 24G in another. I got them used for 350$ and $600 respectively. I'm running the 3080 with a 12600k and the 3090 with a 7900x with higher end motherboards (Asus Maximus and ASRock Tai chi) and have no issues. I paid extra for these motherboards to ensure that I didn't run into any weird compatibility issues.

I just keep getting burned on ASrock, MSI, gigabyte models of things in the lower tier price category. It makes me feel like "the medium soda 40 cents cheaper than the large because it exists only to make the large seem like a better deal."