You are just a poor Nvidia fanboy who doesn't want to understand.
Why would anyone buy a "power efficient" card to save few cents on electricity, but then go on and OC it to waste significantly more power? I don't care about it, when you and other fan little boys for Nvidia claim to care and then go on to OC you are hypocrites.
When you buy the 960 it would be optimized at that frequency at those voltages, at those speeds to use the least possible power, once you overclock it even mildly it uses up a lot more power compared to the speed you gain.
So again, who cares about an OC? If you do care, then why waste your money getting an inferior product that needs OC, that then spends more power, is louder, is hotter, reduces the longevity of the card just to be as fast as a card that is the same price?
This is a new card, its up to Nvidia to add performance, not reduce it. If its sold at a $200 price it better be reasonably faster than the 280x or otherwise its garbage, and no amount of OC room can change that, considering that the competition can also be OC to be even faster.
And you've made up your mind without seeing real world benchmarks yet?
So what?
What if the card is $220 for a Gigabyte G1 edition and gets close to a R9 290? The R9 290 is $240 at it's LOWEST when it's got a rebate.
You're giving the ideal situation for the R9 290, which I like to do as well but realistically speaking, you're not getting the R9 290 you want. Also you're assuming that people are going to be aware of the BEST deal possible. A lot won't be.
And even still don't forget the pricing pressure a GTX 960 provides on AMD requiring them to again lower prices or make their product offering more competitive, even if the GTX 960 isn't a better choice, people like new and the R9 290 may drop again or more rebate deals may be available as a result of the GTX 960 option.
There are WAY too many things to list about this but in short, calling him out as an Nvidia fanboy for saying the GTX 960 maybe a good card, especially when we were just talking about the GTX 960 Gigabyte G1 design, may be unfair. None of us know anything other than guesstimates of what's going on.
Unless you guys have review samples of AIB cards that I'm unaware of, there is no reason for that level of hostility.
Edit: Finally, Nvidia doesn't have to price cards to compete with AMD. A lot of you have to just get that through your heads. They're the market leader. Even if their card performs exactly the same as a competitor, they can still charge more for it. That's what happens when you have good brand name recognition.
If the GTX 960 came out at $250, and still sold well, I wouldn't be surprised. Probably won't, but it wouldn't surprise me if it sold well at that price. Even at $230 wouldn't surprise me if it sold well.