LOL I tried doing that when I was in med school and it was fine for the first two years because I was in the library all day. Once clinical rotations started, I switched to gaming laptops and then eventually a desktop my last year. Just get the dgpu now and enjoy some BF4 during study breaks.
Well holy crap, I'm in med school too! Coincidence or what?
Anyway, I think you understand how things go. I try to squeeze everything in my schedule, but with exams it's just not possible. At least I'm a year and a half away from going to 100% clinical training, so I got time at home.
Well, if I have the money at some point no one is forcing me to keep the 970. I can always sell it and get whatever the best thing is at that moment. Or, you know, I can wait. But I don't like waiting.
Anyway... Regarding the DP/no DP discussion. I don't think this will be an SP card. It just doesn't make sense for NVidia to manufacture such a big chip with only SP in mind. Sure, 28nm is a mature process and all, but we're talking about a jumbo-sized chip here. It may end up being 580sq.mm or 650sq.mm for all I care. It's still huge, it WILL be expensive to manufacture and NVidia isn't a charity, they WILL pass down the cost to the buyers. If professionals (Don't most pros need DP?) don't pay for most of it, I dread to think about how much a potential GeForce card will cost. 1500$ single-GPU card anyone? Yikes...
OTOH, I am very curious to see how these things will overclock. With such huge dies, overclocking potential gets... Interesting. Sure, it probably won't sip power like the 980 and 970 do, but that heat will have to be dissipated from a huge (Comparatively speaking) surface area. So it will definitely be interesting to see how water/LN2/DICE cooling guys will do. And with Maxwell's overclocking in general, I can hope for awesome things to happen.
With all that said, I'm even more interested to see how AMD will do this round. But that's a completely different discussion.