1. Avoid the Founders Edition Cards, they all thermally throttle and do not have the features or componentry for maximum cooling, sound reduction and overclocking.
2. You could buy a FE card water block for $130 and add a backplate for another$30 .... or you can pay the same amount for an AIB card that will perform at least s good as the FE card and most of the time noticeably better. And while you won't get the performance boost of past years as nVidia has upped their game quite a bit an limited what you can do as a AIB partner, there is still a observable increase in fps. There is also a substantial difference in noise and temps
Which card you want for the same price ? The one that goes 159.9 fps or the one that goes 154.9 ?
MSI AIB
Reference FE
Check the 1070... same results
The MSI Gaming Seahawk EK X willl solve the throttling problem for you ... for $540... but the GaminX also solves thee problem for you ... so do you pay $540 or $450 to solve the same problem ?
MSI Seahawk EX X $540
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814127956
MSI Gamng X - $450
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814127947
There are two significant differences between the reference and AIB designs....
1. They can take much more power due to the improved PCB design, even more so once new BIOS arrive that increase the very conservative power limit. If you look at TPUs tests for the 9xx series, you see, unequivocally, that the ones who draw the most power, provide the best fps.
2. They have improved coolers which prevent throttling, lower noise an temps
The other thing you want to understand is that few web sites to in depth reviews that let you examine the true relative differences. Let's examine the claim that all cards clock the same. Open MSI Afterburner and GPUz and assume that you see a new clock 2060 Hz You can then set GPUz to record maximum OC and then you will see what most every review shows
Then you run a benchmark and report the max boost and if they are roughly the same, the conclusion is that the cards are equal. Now for the reality
We see one card (MSI AIB blue line) running at a rock solid 1910 MHz from start to finish ... we see the second card (orange line) bouncing all over the place from 1670 to 1790. In what world can 1910 and 1670 / 1790 produce equal fps ? Yes, if recording max / avg fps you will get close. But what about the min fps ? The author writes
NVIDIA’s own reference design suffers from severe throttling just after few minutes. It probably wouldn’t be that bad if not the frequency spikes. While average clock is somewhere around officially stated boost clock, those spikes cause micro-stuttering, which negatively affects gaming experience.
Meanwhile, MSI GTX 1080 GAMING X generates almost a straight line for GPU frequency (~1910 MHz), with no spikes and rather constant sub-70 C temperature. This should mean that the gaming experience will be much better, and card should theoretically generate better results in most tests
And that is exactly what we see in every review. Unfortunately what we see is average and not minimum fps so we are not seeing the whole story. At this point, the relative dearth of detailed reviews make it difficult to draw conclusions due to the vagaries of the silicon lottery. But we can look at the 9xx series and there we see that the Zotac Amp Extreme, Gigabyte G1 and MSI Gaming X consistently break overclocking barriers that the competing cards don't match.
In conclusion, you can drop on a $90 water block and solve most of the problems of the reference cards (or even an extra $70 if you can get past the deficiencies of CLCs) .. or you can pay an extra $20 for an AIB card that will do the same job eliminating throttling, and many times a bit better because a) it cools the VRM, memory etc more efficiently, b) its BIOS allows higher voltage / power settings or c) its power deliver system allows for more stable power delivery.
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