No offense to junkeymonkey, but to consider everything but the high end to be rejects and therefore not worthy of purchasing, then you should only have a top of the line xeon or i7 in your machine, top of the line ram, etc. Lower binned components aren't necessarily defective, they are binned into classes with well defined specifications, they just don't meet higher standards that you or someone else thinks they should meet. Is my i5-4690k a defective i7, sure why not, but it doesn't mean I didn't get what I paid for, I knew what I paid for, that's the problem here.
A component should meet it's advertised specifications. It's not whining to be upset that the advertised specs were incorrect, to blame that on the people that purchased the card under false pretenses is asinine. If you bought it thinking it was going to be a 980 as you keep saying then yes, that was a little silly, but no one said that. However, if you purchased it with the idea that architecturally it had the same number of units and cache as a 980 which some reviewers believed and reported, that's no one's fault but Nvidia's, they put incorrect specification out there to the public. By mistake or intentionally, it is Nvidia's problem not the people who purchased it with those things in mind.
Additionally, I'm saying this as someone who purchased a 970 after this information came out. I know the last 0.5Gb of vRAM are slower, I know that there could be some coil whine (I don't have any on my card), but simply put I have better things to spend my money on than buying a 980 for epeen. If you are buying a card based on how many texture units, shaders, etc. I would argue that is not doing the research. The money so to speak is in real life performance, as demonstrated by in-game or in-calculation performance. I'm still at 1080p and for the forseeable future, this card will deliver adequate fps at adequate quality on my barely adequate grad student budget. I personally don't want to spend the extra for the 980 even with this information nor heat my house with an r9 290x, as these other options don't meet my criteria.
I do wonder how Nvidia is going to handle this. The advertised specs on Newegg and other sites aren't inaccurate, there are 4Gb of vRAM in there it does have blah blah interface and cuda cores so I wonder if they will use that as grounds to not refund or return the cards. I could see this going class action route more than anything where the 970 owners are compensated in some form for the misinformation. My feelings toward Nvidia on this are more along the lines of "I'm not mad son, just disappointed". I could see this being a genuine miscommunication initially, but it went on for a while.
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