Long story short, tiger direct had the eVGA GTX 780 SC ACX cooler in stock and i placed the order last saturday (paid $736.00 after shipping). Come to find out today that it was really backordered and wouldn't ship until next week July 3rd. My new haswell build arrives today! So i decided to cancel the order and just placed an order for the Gigabyte GTX 780 Windforce 3X card and paid $693 with next day air and rush processing. I know the Gigabyte card is a tad slower, however i just feel like i made a mistake not waiting for the eVGA card... What do you guys think?
I don't know where you get the idea that the Gigabyte card is a tad slower; don't let a web review mislead you into thinking that one factory overclocked card based on the reference PCB is faster than another - I have the SC ACX and while it's a great card, it really isn't different than the Gigabyte card. In fact, the WF3 cooler actually has better temps/noise at 100% load than the ACX.
And on that note, let's talk about web reviews of factory overclocked cards. I'm guessing you saw a review on guru3d or TPU and suddenly think the ACX is "faster". That isn't the case - It just happens that in one review, the SC ACX overclocked 13mhz higher or something meaningless, so due to the silicon lottery it was faster because it achieved a higher overclock. Don't be fooled by what overclocks a reviewer gets, manufacturers go out of the way (and EVGA in particular) to send out handpicked cards that they KNOW will get super high overclocks, and they won't be representative of what actual consumer cards overclock to - case in point, my SC ACX overclocks to 1162mhz, which is lower than any reviewer overclock. That isn't surprising, my card wasn't hand picked and thus does not perform as well as what a web reviewer found. Don't get me wrong, I love my card. I don't even care about overclocking it super high, as it performs very well out of the box even at stock settings - I am completely happy with the ACX card.
Anyway, the gigabyte card isn't faster or slower than the EVGA card. It is just a different brand with a slightly different cooler, you can't go wrong with either card. They're both great cards.
So long story short, you did not make a mistake. Both of these cards are equivalent to each other.