I run AMD(my laptops nvidia) I've recommended Nvidia to my friend who has a similarish build level as mines back in january. I personally prefer AMD but I dont let it get ahead of me on Price to performance on specified tasks.
preferably, Single card is a much better solution, but when you decide to go 3x 1080p, single card isnt much of an option and its recommended to go dual cards. In a dual card situation, crossfire has a slightly better scaling than sli does. In accordance to frametimes, the 290/290x utilize a new method of crossfire which eliminates stuttering on multi gpu setups, and SLI for kepler based gpus have been consistent so far, so there isnt a problem. Because the 290/290x has no retail aftermarket cooling, OC headroom on the current batch of gpus are extremely limited and the cards itself run at a target temperature of 95 degrees(which may be uncomfortable for some to pick up on the fact that the gpu was designed to work under high temperatures). The memory bandwith on the 290/290x tagged along with its 4gb vram is useful for ultra high resolution setups. the 780/780ti's advantage is that it has an established cooler and will most likely clock better and work better on the single monitor setup.
TL;DR: if you are comparing current coolers, the 780/780ti has much value on a single monitor setup. Once you expand to your multimonitor setup, the value of the 290/290x skyrockets, as these gpus were designed with ultra high resolutions in mind.
I personally wouldn't want to go drop down to a 770 as the memory bus is significantly smaller(making heavy games even heavier) when you eventually go onto the multi monitor setup.
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