I read about the 3.5 Gb issue in a few reviews. As you said, I'm not sure how much it'll affect me, though. On top of which, going from a GTX280, I might see a little increase in performance either way.

 

Seconding Dye, the card is good. I have the regular edition and it's great. The 3.5GB issue isn't as big a deal as you'd think, primarily because performance tanks well before the VRAM overfill is an issue. If you're intending to SLI for 4K gaming or above, that's when you might have some grievances about it.

Also unless you need the speed of the PCIe SSD in that form factor, you could easily buy two Samsung 850 EVO 250GB and put them in RAID 0 to get pretty damn close in speed, not use PCIe lanes and yet get double the capacity for $10 less. Best of all, you'll get a longer warranty too (five vs three years).

Lastly, you will no longer need having two graphics cards just to connect your monitor since the 970 supports 4 monitors out of the box. You can use passive/active adapters instead depending on what you need. Whether that's a cheaper option or not will depend on your monitors and what you need to adapt to.

 

I used to put my C: in Raid 0 and thought about doing it again, but I prefer the stability of not having it that way right now (even though I save to two different clouds). Also, although the write is pretty much equal, the read isn't, and I have some massive files for my library program (12GB) that get searched for everything from words and phrases to grammar constructs. Any ounce of read speed I can squeeze is worth it.

As for the card, that's the one I settled on. Looked around at a few other ones with higher clock values, but in the end, I figured the 5 egg rating (Newegg) with 96 reviewers.