Still, just a 2 year warranty. But I've seen soo many cards fail in that age range, it's important to me. Now granted, most all of the ones I've seen fail were abused by DC projects.
Your best bet on AMD side is MSI cards as those have a 3 year warranty. If you want even longer warranty, you should consider EVGA + buying extended warranty. If you intend to also use the card for distributed computing projects over the next 5-10 years, maybe the NV option w/ 5-10 year warranty is better.
One other question is what's the difference between r9 280's and r93 80's? Die shrink? renaming? DirectX version support?
R9 380/380X are Tonga chips and R9 280/280X are Tahiti chips. They are different.
380/380X have 8 Asynchronous Compute Engine which means in theory they are better for some compute tasks and DX12. In practice until now R9 380 = 285 cannot beat a stock 7970 925mhz in DX12 preliminary benchmarks.
The second major change is 380/380X have memory compression which means they need less memory bandwidth to achieve similar performance. This doesn't matter that much because 280X has plenty of bandwidth.
The third major change is R9 380/380x have superior tessellation. In games such as Far Cry 4, The Witcher 3, etc. this helps them.
For reference, at the same GPU clocks here are $170 R9 280X vs. $230 R9 380X compared in many games.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aDeHG4HCEVU
If you aren't in a rush to buy a new GPU, maybe wait until 2016 as you'll have cheaper GTX970/390 cards to choose from. Unfortunately right now all of the $120-250 cards on sale are not stellar values. The best values are in the used market such as this card:
http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t=2458231
The other issue you have is for recent Assassin's Creed games, 2GB cards are significantly worse than 3GB cards so cards like $120 950 or $150 R9 380 2GB aren't good options either.
But 960 4GB cannot be recommended at its price points right now when R9 380 4GB is $180 and R9 280X is $170. I guess your other option is to wait until January/February and hope that NV releases a 960Ti 3GB for $229 or something or wait until you can find a deal on a $150 GTX960 4GB
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