GTX 1080 Overclocking/Water Cooling?

[Helmheid]

Now that 1080 prices are slowly trickling down, I'm finally getting to a point where I can splash out and push my new build another step ahead.

But here's where I can't make a decision. I'm using a Thermaltake The Tower 900 case, which is mainly made for water cooled systems, and I will watercool both CPU and graphics regardless of what card I end up buying.

Question is, if I bought a basic £500 MSI with twin power connectors (8pin+6 pin), added an £100 EK waterblock and put that into my open loop, would I be able to overclock that basic card to similar/same/higher level than, say, a MSI Seahawk or Gigabyte Waterforce?

Twin connector GTX shouldn't suffer power throttling, so it's just a matter of how far would it overclock. Aren't they all the same anyway, except for fancier/more effective cooling on the expensive models, which allows a higher factory overclock?

If I can save ~£200 against a top of the range 1080 AND have fun fitting the custom cooler and tweaking, I'd happily do that! Opinions please?

[prwilson]

I've always thought it was random according to what piece of silicon you get.

[imadaily]

The MSI website shows that they sell some 1080s pre-fitted with a waterblocks (SeaHawk @1771 MHz & SeaHawk-X @1877 MHz) which are clocked lower than one of their air cooled cards (Gaming Z 8G @1911MHz)...

To me this means that they are likely to be binning the cards (or maybe binning the GPUs before they make it onto the cards)
As such I would expect there to be a reasonable chance that a card from a higher range could achieve a higher max OC.

That said if you're looking to just have better performance than a reference GTX1080, then watercooling a 'cheap'/basic GTX1080 should be sufficient (and it'll be a whole lot more satisfying putting it all together than just buying a buying a card fitted with a sealed loop)
...and if you're after genuinely record breaking performance... you probably wouldn't be asking on a forum!

[Helmheid]

Record breaking? Not really. I'm a gamer, plain and simple. And I'm well aware that I don't even -need- more than a run of the mill 1080 to game at 4k. But the whole point of this build is to have a functional gaming rig which also looks great and lets me mess around and tweak.

Saying that, does anyone here have actual hands on experience and stable results overclocking 1080s with home-installed watercooling?

[Xereo]

I was running sli 1080's before upgrading to Ti's. best bed for no thermal throttling is get it blocked.
I experience no throttling at all when on what blocks.

[jimborae]

@Helmheid, did you ever come to a decision on this? Interested as I'm in similar position and would like to move to Nvidia based card for various reasons.