I would say no. The higher tier GPUs have (usually) only slightly better coolers, and come with a slightly higher base overclock. The actual performance gain between a base level and high tier GPU model, is not that much. Especially not enough to justify a 40% price increase. If you want to, and your case has good airflow/cooling, then you can even possibly overclock the standard XC to match the clocks of the FTW3, but this is not guaranteed to be possible. The bigger FTW3 cooler makes it easier to reach and maintain higher clocks, as well as being a better binned GPU, but IMO it is still not worth the extra money for the slight performance gain, especially if your case is good for keeping a GPU cool, which will allow you to manually boost a GPU higher, as the good case cooling will compensate a little for the weaker GPU cooler.