1080: Buy Reference (Founder's) or Custom?

possible reasons to get Founders Edition card:
1. desire to get a 1080 as soon as possible
2. lack of trust in the partner design and manufacturing
3. desire for a fan design dumping most heat outside the case
4. known fit of standardized size, SLI fingers, ...
5. liking the appearance of that shroud

reasons to get the others
1. lower price
2. hoped-for higher throughput
3. lower operating temperature at a given operating point
4. lower fan noise at a given operating condition
5. other special features
6. liking a particular card appearance

Some of the people posting their personal speculations as facts asserted before today that the FE price would set the floor to all others, and that the claimed $599 MSRP would be a chimera. But today what appeared to be a genuine EVGA price revelation showed two models well below the FE price.

As to sound, I took heart from reviewers who described the FE sound quality as good (whooshing rather than tonal), and very quiet at low power levels. The trouble is: my usage is planned to be purely Einstein, so whatever loading the Einstein code attains will be in effect most of the hours I am near the machine. If the fan needs to spool up to banshee level to keep the GPU below 83, that is very bad, and I expect the other design fan solutions really will find it easier to meet that requirement, and at least some of them will sound better while doing so.

As it happens, I have at least two possible usage locations where the feature of dumping a much higher fraction of heat out the back is desirable, and I was eager to get a board quickly, so I placed an FE order at B&H.

But I don't know when it may arrive, so am not even sure I gained any time.

While I still intend to get a 1070 soon after they come out unless the 1080 performs too poorly in Einstein to make that interesting, as of this minute I think for that one I'll wait for a non FE card.

Who did you almost buy an FE from today? I clicked around for about an hour watching various bizarre things change rapidly at NewEgg and B&H, and Amazon never showing me a hint of anything except over-priced Marketplace sellers likely to deliver late. Not long after I placed my order with B&H they actually removed the order button from all the brands.

Apparently a lot of the street store sales today went to people intending to resell them promptly.