Is there perhaps a way you could reconfigure your build a bit so you could fit a GTX 780 into your budget? It's more expensive than both the 770 4 GB and the R9 290, but it performs around the same as R9 290 (it depends on the game, but they're usually rather close; the R9 290 does absolutely destroy the 780 when it comes to 4k, presumably due to the larger memory bus and extra gigabyte of VRAM), and you get the Geforce experience you are so set on.
To be honest, though, I'd only get a 770 if you want shadowplay. It's not particularly hard to manually keep up with drivers, you could even just bookmark the page on AMD's website and check every week or so. Driver updates aren't something that happen particularly frequently; I think around every couple of months, unless you decide to use beta drivers as well.
If you're only gaming, an i5 will perform almost identically in most games. In the future there might be a large difference, but right now an i5 is more than fine except for the most ridiculously high end multi-gpu setups.
Valve is sponsoring development of the OPEN SOURCE drivers for future gaming applications. The project doesn't work on nVidia cards, only on Intel and AMD cards with open source drivers. The aforementioned project aims at delivering LLVM-based shader optimization code to Mesa3D, and follows LLVM's BSD licensing. Their code talks to the GPL GCC-based linux system by using an open source "IR" layer, that translates instructions. This combines the benefits of using the LLVM plug-ins with the GPL nature of GCC-based linux subsystems, without affecting performance.
Unless nVidia stops hating on open source, they're pretty much history for future gaming.
AMD cards have other benefits: more compute power, better compatibility and scalability for compute applications, better compatibility for hardware passthrough virtualization, better performance without driver tricks due to wider memory buses and better power delivery assemblies, etc...
ive been reading tons and tons and tons of reviews on 290 cause i plan on getting one once im saved up the best one ive found for TEMPS and fps is http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814202103&cm_re=vapor_x_290-_-14-202-103-_-Product the Asus will be good but temp wise its on the worse side of things its gonna rev up the fan and have higher temps under load JMHO
Dude choosing Nvidia for the UI is just lazy. Your are not my grandma but a rather tech-savy person so you should do just fine installing your drivers manually. What is even the deal with that?
Geforce Experience is annoying and stupid. I own a laptop with a GTX 660M and the 'game optimizations' suck balls. It's pretty much like apple. You have it their way or not at all. No customization, no fps target (using Geforce experience the fps usually crawl in the 30s. unplayable.). Raptr is not any better, though. I would use neither of them and choose my settings myself. This way I can get exactly what I want (I value AA and AF over maxed out lighting, etc...).
I don't care about shadowplay. There are plenty of capturing programs out there which will have good performance (though not as good as shadowplay but that's not worth the extra money).
Nvidia is a real pain in the a** when it comes to linux. I recently installed Ubuntu on my laptop and the driver is giving me a headache. Even worse is tht nvidia refuses to provide open source linux drivers. That makes them pretty much dead there...
Pretty much. Sacrificing all the extra performance of the 290 for a cheesey UI is insanity. And all the other points, there are less points in favour of Nvidia.
If I might add a suggestion: Get the Sapphire Tri-X, not the Asus.
The Direct CUII cooler is not made for the smaller AMD dies, resulting in the outer heatpipes not making good contact with the chip: http://vr-zone.com/articles/asus-radeon-r9-290x-directcu-ii-oc-review/70398.html?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=asus-radeon-r9-290x-directcu-ii-oc-review
I own the Tri-X myself and it is really a great card
