No, but personal experience of my card - the choice of which was heavily informed by independent reviewers - has led to my belief. In virtually all respects I couldn't ask for more from it.
If I have a 7xx series card, then i would buy an another 7xx series card for sli because they are cheap. But if I'm starting from scratch, then I'll choose the 970 instead.
Efficiency is overrated. Are you telling me a gtx 750ti is a superior card to a 780 ti because its more efficient? Nvidia stresses TDP lately because they weren't able to make their Maxwell cards significantly more powerful because its still a 28nm card, so they had to find something else to sell their latest and greatest.
I have to laugh when I see some Nvidia fanboy going on about Nvidias lower TDP, then they talk about overclocking their 780, which makes the card far LESS efficient and probably draws way more power than a 290x(and is still less powerful). You cant claim to care about TDP if you are also significantly overclocking your card, which increases the power draw dramatically.
The reason AMD is watercooling the 390x is because they got burned by putting out a cheap reference cooler with the 290 and 290x. Instead they will
overkill the reference water cooler for good measure so they can go balls to the wall on performance, while letting the aftermarket companies like Sapphire R&D effective air coolers, which they did with the 290/x.
Sapphire 290/x cards ended up running cooler than every 780ti out there. Theres no reason to think sapphire, MSI and powercolor wont do the same thing again for the 390x, which will be a 20nm card and therefore probably blow away the 980 in performance. So these same Nvidia fanboys going on about TDP will then be overclocking the shit out of their 980s in order to try to come close to the 390x, while probably drawing even more power than the 390x
.
