pomme_de_terror

I agree with most here, the 970 is a great card with low power draw and great 1080p performance. as for clarification of the 3.5gb VRAM issue. It was basically because it has 4gb of vram but only 3.5gb of the 4 is high bandwitdth, so once you hit over 3.5gb of use (which is nearly impossible at 1080p) performance will drop. One consideration though is that your cpu will most likely be a bottleneck, so you might want to upgrade that and get a 960 which also a great card.

I personally upgraded to Skylake and I love it. However it would be more cost effective to just get the xeon.