graphics cards!

[Doughnutnator]

Look at this ugly POS LOL I am not paying perfectly good money and lots of it for that matter for a POS like this. It's supposed to be a high end device and should not look like it came from a 25cent gumball machine at Chucky Cheese LOL.

There's no reference cooler for the 970, only reference PCB.

The fact that companies like PNY, EVGA and Galaxy took their old 760-670 blower style coolers and put them in 970's is other story.

Aesthetics doesn't give more power to a card, the GPU is what matters. Aftermarket 970's aren't that expensive, EVGA ACX 2.0 970 isn't very expensive (it's $330) and that card really looks like a High End GPU.

You can't entirely judge a card just by the cooler. In that case the R9 290x should suck because the reference design "looks like it came from a 25cent gumball machine at Chucky Cheese", but that's not the case, the GPU is good with great performance.

Also Maxwell isn't that hot, so it doesn't really need too much cooling.

[I/O]

You can't entirely judge a card just by the cooler.

Ya you can and it's called brand image. I am not paying Cold Hard Canadian Cash and premium price for a premium product that looks like it was put together by a mentally challenged child enrolled in art therapy class.

[Doughnutnator]

Ya you can and it's called brand image. I am not paying Cold Hard Canadian Cash and premium price for a premium product that looks like it was put together by a mentally challenged child enrolled in art therapy class.

Brand image isn't that important with GPU's, if you only care about aesthetics that's fine. Performance is what really matters. AMD went a little bit cheap with their coolers in the 290/290X, but nobody cried about that, the GPU's have good performance, that's what people want when buying a GPU.

I can't look at my GPU and game at the same time. I just install it, and use it. I don't know if you like to look at your GPU instead of using it.

Anyways if you care that much about brand image you should buy a reference GTX 980, it really looks like a premium GPU. And you're not forced to buy a 970, if you don't like it don't buy it. There's a lot of GPU's on the market, i'm pretty sure you'll find one that will please your eyes.

As far as I know, Nvidia didn't released the reference cooler for the 970 because it's a little bit expensive to make, and the 970 is more like a price/performance card, offering very good performance for a very good price. You're lucky, AMD lowered the price of the 290-290X, but that didn't happened in all the countries, in my case, my G1 Gaming 970 cost me the same as an Asus DirectCU II 280X.

[DirtySHISNO]

970 hands down or a 780/780ti if you can find any at a bargain price. For the near future 970 would be the better choice though.