I had a .264 Win Mag for a number of years. I shot deer, elk, coyotes and ground squirrels with it. The ballistics are awesome and there's little kick.

That's the good part.

The bad part is it took a long time to find a load that would shoot accurately {I never was 100% happy with that} and...I had inexplicable pressure problems with mine. Ruger couldn't figure out why the gun blew primers and it frustrated them so much they just went ahead and rebarrelled it for me for free. That took care of the pressure problems. A friend has been shooting .264 Win Mags for years and has about 6 of them and more have passed thru his hands. He has experienced the exact same issues I have. Finicky accuracy issues and pressure problems as well. Really weird. I've never heard of this from other calibers and since my experience is, even including my friend's, limited, have no explanation for it. Loads that were fine in other rifles {including factory loads} caused blown primers. Acceptable loads in the problem rifles produced unacceptably low velocities.

Myself, reflecting back, I think I'd take a 6.5/06 or a necked down 9.3x62 and be happy. I don't think the extra powder capacity in the Win mag does much and it may be that the configuration of the case or something is a cause of some of the pressure spikes we saw. Who knows.

We are nuts for the 6.5 bore size. We've had 6 6.5x55's from CZ, Ruger, Howa and SAKO not to mention Husqvarna-made surplus guns. Used them on elk, deer, yotes, etc. My favorite caliber. One of my sons-in-law just bought a Creedmor and went out and killed a deer with it, but we'll see how it turns out over time.