Well, Newegg had the MSI GTX 980 Gaming 4G on sale for $450, which was a deal I could not turn down. Thankfully they worked out a deal for me to return the MSI GTX 970 100ME with no restocking and free return shipping, so now I got the card I originally wanted at a price I felt was reasonable.
I probably could push this card a tad further, but during this run the core did throttle down to 1528 for a few frames, so this is about as far as I can go using Afterburner. Memory could probably go up to 8400mhz, but I am not going to worry with it. That would give me maybe 2-3 more fps if my core would run at 1552mhz.
This thread is not a popular as it used to be it seems, but I'll share my results because this 980 overclocked to 1542/8200 is on par with my old 760 SLI set up, but runs smoother.
81.5 fps
MSI GTX 980 Gaming 4G @ 1542/8200, with CPU @ 4.2ghz and DRAM @ 2200mhz