Lokius81
Even on stock settings it seems like my 1080 SC runs quite hot..... i have to move to fan profile to 70% manualy just to keep it in the low to mid 70s.... is this normal?
Its quite noisy at 70%....

 
Was the card reaching thermal throttling temps before you adjusted the fan? If so than yes, that's bad. If not than it's fine. A card seeming kind of warm by you while running at 70% fan is clearly not a problem with the card. Also... 70% fan? They made 100% fan where it is to keep the GPU cool enough to operate normally. If you can get away with only 70% then congratulations!

Is your overclocking performance and end in itself? Or are you actually not able to play your games and at high enough quality and framerate, so you're pushing for more? If this just a matter of your published e-peen numbers not being as high as someone else, I'd urge you to develop a different perspective.
The 1080 SC is already a factory overclocked version of the 1080 ACX. It ships already clocked over 100 MHz behind what the base model ships at. That's what the SC means, btw, it's "superclocked" compared to the base model. That you're not able to go enough higher even than that to make your e-peen compare favorably with someone else's is not a good justification for subjecting EVGA to expense and loss of profit.

If I were you I'd just use the card, play some games, have fun, and enjoy it. Don't get so wrapped around the axle about the numbers. The difference in actual framerates in any game between the OC the OP is getting and what the next guy with a 1/4" longer e-peen is what, 2 or 3 frames per second at most? You'll never even notice that under real life gaming conditions.

I'm holding out for a 1080 SC, and I'll probably just run it stock, just as I run my cpu and my current 960 SSC at stock speeds. I might tweak the speeds slightly if I'm not satisfied with the framerates and think I might get enough boost to be worth it, but otherwise I'll probably just run it stock. I'm confident in my e-manhood.

I'm with sethleigh. I do not understand the fascination with firestrike scores or highest overclock. The thing was made to play games. And like he said: the difference between stock FPS and overclocked FPS is 1-2%

sethleigh
Is your overclocking performance and end in itself? Or are you actually not able to play your games and at high enough quality and framerate, so you're pushing for more? If this just a matter of your published e-peen numbers not being as high as someone else, I'd urge you to develop a different perspective.
The 1080 SC is already a factory overclocked version of the 1080 ACX. It ships already clocked over 100 MHz behind what the base model ships at. That's what the SC means, btw, it's "superclocked" compared to the base model. That you're not able to go enough higher even than that to make your e-peen compare favorably with someone else's is not a good justification for subjecting EVGA to expense and loss of profit.

If I were you I'd just use the card, play some games, have fun, and enjoy it. Don't get so wrapped around the axle about the numbers. The difference in actual framerates in any game between the OC the OP is getting and what the next guy with a 1/4" longer e-peen is what, 2 or 3 frames per second at most? You'll never even notice that under real life gaming conditions.

I'm holding out for a 1080 SC, and I'll probably just run it stock, just as I run my cpu and my current 960 SSC at stock speeds. I might tweak the speeds slightly if I'm not satisfied with the framerates and think I might get enough boost to be worth it, but otherwise I'll probably just run it stock. I'm confident in my e-manhood.

It's funny how in trying to be reasonable you're generally insulting instead. You don't know the setup in question, so defaulting to "e-peen" comments is childish and helps no one.
 
My setup is either to 3440x1440 or 4k, in either case a good overclock on the 1070 is generally the difference between choppy and smooth framerates. Gameplay is noticeably much better with the OC, I'm finally stable above 60 on my primary monitor.

zshadez
 
It's funny how in trying to be reasonable you're generally insulting instead. You don't know the setup in question, so defaulting to "e-peen" comments is childish and helps no one.
 
My setup is either to 3440x1440 or 4k, in either case a good overclock on the 1070 is generally the difference between choppy and smooth framerates. Gameplay is noticeably much better with the OC, I'm finally stable above 60 on my primary monitor.

The OP reported a +85 MHz overclock. His e-peen better reported +170, and suggested that the OP RMA his card. Think about that. EVGA sells a card as factory overclocked by over 100 MHz as compared to the base model. And the card clearly achieves the advertised speed stably. In fact, he achieves that and an additional 85 MHz. That's pretty good value for money, and EVGA's card performs better than advertized. So, what's the justification for an RMA? You do realize that with an RMA EVGA is going to lose money, right?

But consider the difference between an 85MHz overclock and a 170 MHz overclock. Starting at 1708 base clock for the out-of-box SC, add 85 for the OP and 170 for the guy who thinks the OP is entitled to make EVGA lose money on a card that works better than advertized. That's 1793 MHz as opposed to 1878 MHz. Dividing those we see about a 4 1/2% difference. If the guy with the longer e-peen is getting 60 fps on his 4k monitor the OP is getting 57 or 58. In practice you're never going to see that 2 fps difference.

And that's assuming that the boost clocks are even all that different. I don't recall seeing them compare actual achieved boost clocks under load. We're just assuming that the guy with the higher offset to the base clock is actually getting a 4 1/2% advantage, but I haven't seen the proof that he really is.

Trust me about 4K, I feel it too. I'm running a 4K monitor with a Geforce 960 SSC right now, and feeling the pain. After playing The Division for a week at 20-30 fps I've bit the bullet and down-rezzed to 1080p just so I can peg it at 60 fps for playability. I'm trying to buy a 1080 SC as well, and have been glued to the websites for several days now trying to catch one in stock. I appreciate the advantages of buying a faster card. That's why I'm trying to buy one, like so many others.

My whole point is that with so many of these guys it seems as if the most important thing to them when they first pull it out of the box is just how much further than stock they can push their overclock, as if the overclock itself were the end, and not just a means to an end. If the true end is more playable quality and framerates in games, then a little common sense kicks in. If my overclock ends up being 50 MHz lower than the next guy's, then yeah, I suppose he wins the e-peen contest, but all other things being equal, he might see 1 or at most 2 fps advantage over me in any games we might play. That's just not a big deal, and certainly not worth losing sleep over. With these things the law of diminishing returns applies. What are you willing to do for that last 20 or 30 MHz of overclock? And what if you achieve that last 20 or 30 MHz of overclock? What real world performance actually using the card have you gained?

You might be missing the point where I told them that a cartoon of pushing far enough past manufacturer spec to make you happy is not a reason to RMA. I completely agree with that, and think that was a stupid thing to consider or complain about, every chip overclocks differently, it's fine to hope for a certain result but of course anything you get beyond factory spec is based on luck.

That said, jumping to e-peen insults provides no real benefit to anyone. Your message was good, but the phrasing was a bit childish.

Point taken, and I appreciate your comments. Probably not the best tack to take in conversations like this, and I'll reevaluate my approach for the future. I think the whole e-peen thing helps people see how ridiculous this whole thing is though.

I've overclocked off and on for like 25 or 30 years in machines I bought or built. I get it. I've always used overclocking as  a way to eek out some better performance if the benefit were tangible enough. It seems nowadays though overclocking is like a test of virtual manhood, where the contest is to see who overclocks the best/has the luckiest draw in the silicon lottery. The overclock itself has become the end, rather than the means to an end, which is more pleasurable use of the machine. I am not a fan of this newer focus on the overclock itself.

It's why I'm still running a 5 year old CPU in my machine, btw. Until 9 or 10 months ago I was running a Core i7 950 quad-core at 3 GHz. I found a Xeon 5680 6-core 3.3 GHz for cheap (maybe $125) and dropped it in for a nice upgrade. Is it as fast as today's cpus? No, certainly not. But I'd never notice, because in Windows itself, and in almost any game I play, the cpu isn't that big a deal - it's all about the graphics card. It's why I'm looking to upgrade to a 1080 SC card to run my 4K monitor better, but I still am perfectly satisfied with my 6-core Xeon from 2011. And it's not even overclocked at all.
 
I'm currently doing a little scouting to possibly move toward rebuilding my machine with an X99 board and an Intel 6850 at some point, but not because I feel I really need the extra oomph, but just because at some point the caps on my X58 board will go bad and my machine will become unstable, and I'd like to make a move up to a new generation before I get to that point so I don't have an unexpected failure and be out of my machine for a while.

Funny enough the last 5 years I've been spending much more time tinkering with the mechanics and settings than I actually have gaming. In the last month I've probably spend 30 hours tweaking frequencies, voltages, and .inis and maybe two hours tops actually playing something. Computers have become for me what cars are to a lot of guys. I enjoy the tinkering as much as any game.
 
My last box lived over a decade with no changes, but this current machine started something like 5 years ago as low level fx build for $500. It's gradually changed one piece at a time until it's now a 4690k @ 4.7 and now with a 1070 +250/500. During all that time I've probably only really played 5 games, and most for 30 hours or less. It's not like I'm going to be gunning my hand-tweaked roadster 0-60 or running it up past 200mph anywhere near often or at all, it's just the enjoyment of the time put in to it. I doubt I'm the only one who makes the comparison between computers and cars. My dad used to spend days in the garage tweaking things, I do the same with my computer. Work and wife kill my focus for gaming a lot of the time, but tinkering only takes a minute until it's lasted all day. :D

No doubt, well that's not my thing with computers, but I totally get it. I've built two violins and an electric guitar (and tube amp) from scratch, and I don't actually play either violin or guitar! I like doing things too, so I totally get that.
With computers I'm an unrepentant gamer though. I tinker with my machines too sometimes, but I really do play games, and way too much of it. I actually spent a couple of evenings a few months back overclocking my new Intel Xeon 5680 cpu to see what I could do it with it. After all that I set it back to stock settings for actual use, because I didn't think that the performance gains of aggressive overclocking were going to get me anything that I'd actually notice in real usage situations, and mild overclocks even less so. So why stress the equipment?

The sad thing is I like tinkering enough that I put in a Swiftech 220X water cooling system in my machine, and I'm running it stock! Talk about totally unnecessary. Oh well. I'm well set up, however, if I want to watercool whatever 1080 card I end up getting, or if I do move up to an Intel i7 6850 I can water cool it from day 1.
 
I suppose if people want to spent time and money building machines just so they can measure them and compare measurements with other people on the internet, I can't really find fault with that. I've got two violins and an electric guitar I can't really play well that would make me a hypocrit if I said otherwise. Still, I can't resist the impulse to remind some of these guys that their computers are actually made to be used, too. Stroking their e-peen is all fine and good if that's what they really want to do, but at least they should man up and admit that's what they're doing.

Lokius81
Even on stock settings it seems like my 1080 SC runs quite hot..... i have to move to fan profile to 70% manualy just to keep it in the low to mid 70s.... is this normal?
Its quite noisy at 70%....

 Hard to say exactly without knowing what case you have and your airflow.  Seems a little high.  Im not sure what GPU utility you are running but make sure you have an aggressive fan curve to help get rid of the heat before you get above 70.
 
As far as having the fastest OC, its like tuning a car to make it the faster.  Some people just to do it to see how fast they can make it go.  The 1080 can easily play just about anything at 4k with decent frame rates.  You might have to tinker with some settings but more often than not the difference will be negligible.