AMD 290 or Nvidia 770?

[Appletax]

I am going to be building a computer soon for gaming and school. I am interested in both the Sapphire AMD 290 Tri-X OC and the EVGA SuperClocked Nvidia 770 w/ ACX cooler. I want an Nvidia Maxwell GPU, but don't want to wait for it. I can always upgrade in the future

Here's how I view the two:

EVGA:
- Much better software and drivers
- Best GPU maker for quality and customer support
- About $100 cheaper
- Plenty fast for playing all games at ultra settings
- Uses less electricity

AMD
- Inferior software and drivers
- Best performance for the money - has double the VRAM
- At $450 ish for cards with custom coolers it is kind of expensive compared to the $354 EVGA card (currently has a $15 mail-in-rebate).
- Hard to obtain at the moment

At this point I'd pick up the Nvidia card because I feel that it will be of much higher quality, albeit at a significant lower speed than the AMD card. It should be so fast that I will have no complaints. The rest of the system will be top notch so I should only need to upgrade the GPU later on down the road when I'm ready.

Your thoughts?

Edit: 100% an Nvidia fanboy because AMD's products are inefficient, run hot and have inferior driver support. Got dual EVGA 970s and they can play any game @ 4K Ultra.

 

[ohio_grad_06]

Much higher quality? Dunno about that. I have a Radeon 7850 I'm happy with and had nvidia for a long time before the 7850. That said the 290 will spank the 770.

The 290 I read somewhere if you overclock the 290, it can actually beat out the GTX 780 Titan. Your GTX 770 is going to be equivalent to last years GTX 680. Good card though. If you are just playing 1080p on a single screen, 2gb of vram should be fine for now. If you do multiple screens, grab the card with better vram.

I'm very happy with my 7850, but I will say driver wise, I've had one or two games that I had issues with(batman arkham origins), which is said to be buggy anyway. My other games like Max Payne 3, Far Cry 3, Skyrim, Sleeping Dogs, AC: Black Flag, etc they do great, no complaints.

Either card should be good really if you are playing on a single screen. Maybe get the 4gb 770 to feel a little better about it and OC it later?

 

[Appletax]

Either card should be good really if you are playing on a single screen. Maybe get the 4gb 770 to feel a little better about it and OC it later?

Lol....


I would get this: http://www.sapphiretech.com/presentation/product/?cid=1&gid=3&sgid=1227&pid=2091&psn=&lid=1&leg=0#

but I can't find it anywhere

 

[ohio_grad_06]

Better yet, according to one of my tech friends, the powercolor r9 290's can be unlocked to a 290x.

 

[Appletax]

It appears that it'll be impossible to get a custom cooled 290 for awhile. I'll just go with the Nvidia card so I can get a card now that's fast and relatively cheap. My goal would be to sell the card and upgrade sometime after Maxwells arrival so maybe with the 900 series.