Ended up grabbing a PNY GTX 660. At the equivalent of €120 shipped (that's less than the 1GB cards in the OP) with the Batman Origins preorder bundle it was just too cheap/tempting to pass up.
The one caveat is that I’m not exactly enamored with the Nvidia reference cooler. This thing does get pretty darn hot, so I’m not going to push it. I did increase the power target and set the memory at 6600MHz (effective), though.
Still, noise on the default fan profile isn’t too bad and settles the card in at about 75C in a pretty small case (which seems to be in line with other reviews using the reference cooler), merrily trotting along at 1110MHz as the most frequently seen core clock under heavy load. Kicking the fan into loud territory drops the temp by 10C or so and nudges the clock up a tick or two, but that really isn’t worth the trade off.
I don’t think I could have done much better in terms of value and/or actual gameplay quality given my price and power targets, so overall I’m pretty pleased with it.
