What is the best Gtx 1080 to get for VR and 4k gaming?

[BNWilliams007]

Hello, I plan to buy a gtx 1080 card soon since they are beginning to finally come in stock, however, with such a high price tag and so many models to choose from, I want to make sure that I get the best bang for my buck. With a gtx 1080, I hope to do VR and 4k gaming and am considering running an sli config down the road but for now I only can afford a single GPU.

I was planning on waiting for the Gigabyte gtx 1080 Xtreme to come back into stock but it is taking forever and I'm beginning to lose my patience and may just end up buying another model. The reason why the Gigabyte gtx 1080 Xtreme is number 1 on my list is because I heard nothing but good things about the Gigabyte 980 ti Xtreme, in addition, the card comes with a 5.25" bay for VR headsets and a HB sli bridge which will come in handy if I want to sli in the future.

If I couldn't get a Gigabyte 1080 Xtreme, then my next choice would the Zotac Amp Extreme, following the Asus Strix, and the EVGA FTW. Unfortunately though, there isn't all that much information about the Gigabytre Xtreme due to the low stock but I wanted to get other people's opinions if it's still worth waiting for Gigabyt, or if I should just get another card instead?

EVGA has great customer service so I was tempted to buy their card, however, I have seen benchmarks where it lost to the Zotac Amp Extreme so I'm unsure of which card would be best for me. http:// My case should be large enough to fit any of these cards as I have a high tower case. I assume, the longer the card, the better the cooler and performance it has right? This would make the Gigabyte Xtreme or the Zotac Amp Extreme the winner right?

I'm still a newbie to PC building and built my first rig a couple months ago, now all I need is a GPU but I'm unsure of which one to get.

Here is my component list: http://pcpartpicker.com/user/BNWilliams007/saved/Yg2CmG

And I already took a look at this list: http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/id-3047729/nvidia-geforce-gtx-1000-series-megathread-faq-resources.html#17902597

Here I can see that the Zotac Amp Extreme has the highest clock speed but are there other areas that the other GPUs have over Zotac that I should be concerned with or am overlooking such as customer service, thermal throttling, sli scaling, etc?

Thank you for your time.

 

[Hlsgsz]

My favourite would be the MSi GTX 1080 SEA HAWK X. Overclock teh hell out of it and put all that heat out without noise.

 

[Math Geek]

having read all those reviews as i linked them, i can say that none of them was any better than the others. same performance out of the box and once oc'ed they all hit the same speeds with the same performance again. they were all pretty cool with a couple being a good bit lower (seahawk x and g1 i believe it was) but none of them was very hot or loud. the FE of course is but your not considering one of those

honestly, looks, price and extras in the box are the difference in the cards. that and of course whatever one you can actually find in stock somewhere

everyone has their favs of course and with good reason. i am looking closely at the EVGA FTW DT they just announced. the same pcb as the FTW card at stock FE clocks. save $40 and then oc it yourself back to true ftw speeds then drop a waterblock on it when ek makes one and you got 2 x 8-pin power, 10+2 power phases and dual bios to play with and oc all you want. $649 instead of $679 for normal ftw editon

i'm leaning this way can you tell???

 

[BNWilliams007]

Thank you for the comments, since the cards are pretty similar to performance for the most part, I've decided that if the Gigabyte Xtreme isn't available by the end of this week then I'll just buy the EVGA FTW, Zotac Amp Extreme, or the Asus Strix, which ever becomes available the soonest.

Oh I did have one more question, is the Asus Strix 1080 OC worth buying over the regular edition? I understand the OC just means that it was further overclocked at the factory of manufacture, but would it be better to just buy the regular version and OC it myself to save some money? Or is the OC'd version always ahead of the regular version? Is this scenario the same as the EVGA FTW 1080 vs EVGA FTW DT 1080?

 

[Math Geek]

right the asus gaming 8g and 8g oc are the same card with different clock speeds. same with the ftw and ftw dt. same stuff under the hood with different clock speeds out of the box.

so you can oc the cheaper cards and match the more expensive ones no problem. i'm looking at the ftw dt myself. looks like a winner for the same price as an evga SC card with all the extras of the ftw card.

 

[BNWilliams007]

Ok that makes sense then, thank you again for your helpful comments.