Given there's now an alternative I'd personally avoid the 970 like the plague, even if it's a few quid cheaper. Nvidia's last few generations of cards have been notorious for falling behind when referencing Nvidia's new cards and AMD's cards. Combined with the FUBAR memory controller on the 970, which is currently being worked around largely by constant driver patches - I wonder if they'll keep that up now the 1000 series is out?
Fair way off the 970? O_o
There's the odd game where it strangely lags but it's mostly ahead, often by a lot.
As scaryjim said, add VAT and it's actually priced quite well.
Are you running really high res? If not, why not just use a HDMI>DVI passive adapter? HDMI is basically just single-link DVI electrically.
Yeah, power per area has been increasing for a while - even if power/transistor drops, it's going up against transistors/area which more than cancels it out with recent nodes. Comparing with CPUs is a little misleading as they have a big GPU taking up a lot of the space but often sitting idle in benchmarks - Intel's CPU cores are IIRC below 10mm2 each now and yet power is roughly the same as when they were many times that size. With GPUs, most of the silicon is actively used in tasks so that power scaling isn't hidden.
You'd think AMD would, one day, learn not to give a worst-case impression on release day reviews!
Check overclockers - they have the 4GB version for <£180 last time I checked.
This. As far as I can tell it's intended to replace the 380/X and does a pretty stellar job of that, and it's pretty much where I expected in terms of performance (once you ignore the outlying results from rumour sites). Efficiency isn't where I'd hoped but it's a big improvement over the cards it replaces, and we should wait and see what partner cards are like - I don't expect much difference but better quality VRMs and a better cooler might improve things a bit.