Radeon HD 6000

I've retained a Sapphire Radeon HD 6770, Two Sapphire Radeon HD 7870 GHz cards in CF and a Sapphire Radeon HD 7790... (they were all staunch and wonderful). Those golden, immemorial, beauty-filled times, currently vanished and faded away... What was your favorite GPU in those times? I remember...

Looking to upgrade my Radeon 5870 from 5ish years ago. After scouring benchmarks and hundreds of posts on different websites I think the gtx 970 is the best choice. The only thing that worries me abut it is the 4gb (or 3.5 gb from what I read) of vram. While most consider the 970 a better card...