I use 4 x 970 (GV-N970WF3OC-4GD) cards plus 2 x 750 Ti per rig with a single high quality PSU (I refuse to use low quality/low capacity PSUs anymore). The 750 Ti's being anything but Gigabyte OC cards (GV-N75TOC-2GI ) because I had 3 out of 6 of them die on me in about 15 months while having zero issues with Asus and Msi cards. Even though the Gigabyte cards have 36 months of warranty, it take quite some time to replace them.
I've been used Gigabyte GV-N75TOC-2GI since it hit the market. I got 24 of them on 4 rigs. I run them overclock 24/7. Then, 2 of them died (broken fan) during this summer and I noticed that those cards were above the processor. There is extremely hot around that area. If I build a new rig in future, I'll move those cards away from the processor area.
I know a lot of miners like to overclock their cards maximum and they always push the fan faster to lower temp. However, they don't know the fan cannot handle it. In my exp, run at stock clock in the summer and do whatever you like in the winter. For me, I better buy 1 more GTX 750ti than overclock 6 x GTX 750ti to get a extra free card.
That's was not the issue in my case. I had them at 60°C temp target with about 70% fan speed and I don't think they ever reached 60°C and all 3 of them died the same way; computer randomly frooze, after restart the cards weren't recognized at all by the PC and the fans of the cards weren't started either. Also, there was a distinct discoloration (big brown spot) at the back of the PCB on all of them (even on the working ones) at the same spot. It's possible I might just had a bad batch but there's others out there with the same issue which makes me believe these cards are just simply terribly designed with subpar components. Also, I've never had any issues with any other Gigabyte cards (660, 780 Ti, 970) and any other 750 Ti cards (MSI, Asus). Edit: Also, the hottest parts of the cards were only around 70°C, measured with an infrared gun.
Cooling issue. When it discolors, that means there is intense heat above it. Guessing some part of the card wasn't cooled properly (by design or faulty, by design).
Some manufacturers coolers are pretty terrible to be perfectly honest. The only reason they work well is because games don't fully utilize the GPU (usually). You can usually tell who has the best cooler based off throttling that happens. I have EVGA, Gigabyte, and Asus. EVGA definitely seems to have the worse coolers out of the bunch and Gigabyte the best (or are bios flashed in such a way they never throttle). This changes amongst the same generation though. EVGA has like a half a dozen 970s with different versions of coolers and clock speeds so it's impossibly hard to tell what is what. Asus makes one card and Gigabyte two. Windforce I would stay away from as they suck more voltage then the normal model (the ones with the blue LEDs on the side).
I've wanted to try MSI cards, but they always demand a price premium and I'd rather stick to Asus if I'm going to do that.
And yup to the fans dying early if you run them too fast. I ran all my AMD miners with fans at about 80% to maintain cooler GPU temperatures. They always died. XFX in particular had really shitty fans and I had to replace each one of them about twice for the year I owned them. Asus had the best coolers that never went bad and the stock blowers AMD produces also never went bad no matter what speed you ran them at. Funny enough, the cheapest cards I bought from Visiontek ran and overclocked just as well as the other cards and the coolers never failed.
Currently I just run the cards on auto and let them do what they want. If they explode, I RMA them. I have enough room between cards where none of the temperatures look outlandish or start to throttle on their own.
None of these are good prices and I'm guessing you're making a healthy profit. Back when I mined Burst, I bought 5TB external drives for $130 a pop. The can now be found for about $115.