sillynilly :
Looks great, but I love the Founder's Edition more. Always have loved the original versions from Nvidia - they just seem so much beefier.
While some may like how the reference ("founders") cards look, sad to say, compared to most (all?) non-reference designs (most especially those at the higher end), the "founders" edition cards are of poorer quality. Overall PCB layout & design, power phase design, and cooling, of "founders edition" cards, are woefully inferior. And, as if to add insult to injury, priced far higher, as well...
Not surprisingly, nVidia seems to be employing a strategy of over-hyping coupled with deliberate underproduction. This has resulted in heavy price gouging, whereby founders edition cards can only be obtained for ~ 1/3 to 1/2 or over what nVidia's stated MSRP for them is. Ya... nVidia priced their inferior "founders" cards higher "to avoid undercutting their partners" Riiiight... lol. Disappointing to see that bs line in the 1080 article the other day, btw, Tom's. Considering the lower quality of the founders cards, this must surely be NV's biggest marketing coup in some time, if not ever. And at a time when the desktop market is shrinking, to boot...
It's all but impossible to believe this isn't precisely what NV intended. You'd either have to have money to burn, or blinded by hype to overpay so much for a 1080. Will it be the same with their AIB partners cards at least in the beginning? Or for the 1070? Possibly? Most likely? Time will tell.