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www.anandtech.com/show/8 ··· location"The worst case scenario on the other hand would be to have the NVIDIA heuristics fail, or alternatively ending up with a workload where no great solution exists, and over 3.5GB of resources must be repeatedly and heavily accessed. In this case there is certainly the potential for performance to crumple, especially if accessing resources in the slow segment is a blocking action. And in this case the GTX 970 would still perform better than a true 3.5GB card since the slow segment is still much faster than system memory, but its nonetheless significantly slower than the 3.5GB segment as well."
Basically, people are upset that nvidia said it was 4gb, and it's 3.5+extra(where the extra isn't really 'usable')......But at the end of the day, it's still a 3.5gig+a little extra card. And at it's price point, vs performance is a ridiculous value.
Basically, at your price point, the gtx 970 is the best card you could possibly get.