Looks like I 've got room for about 13" long by up to 6" deep - I need to check the spec sizes now on those two cards but I can't imagine either of them being larger than that.

Lol. I got mine 2 days ago, went pretty smooth. Just stay calm and don't pull the trigger until the one you want is posted. You don't want to have buyers remorse.

I really don't know which I should get.

EVGA GeForce GTX 1080 Ti SC2 GAMING 
EVGA GeForce GTX 1080 Ti FTW3 GAMING
 
Video editing with DaVinci Resolve 14 and HitFilm Pro, Some CGI, Composting. Audio recording/mixing and music creation, lots of photoshop and lightroom editing, some gaming and twitch streaming (all on the same box). and of course wasting time ;-)

Thoughts anyone?

spring1898
Twitch stream just ended

Yep, waiting for some juice

spring1898
FTW3 has more aggressive fan curve, so it performs around 2-3% better than SC2 in stock situations.
The tri-fan configuration and PCB of the FTW "might" be superior for max overclock, but you are likely to limited by the silicon lottery than fan/pcb. 
 
But get whatever you can so long as it fits, with supply limited, we cannot be picky. 

Would one have a better resale value than the other when it comes time to upgrade?

FTW3 likely, But not by much. More desirable rather than more money on the used market (assuming this is at least a generation away before upgrade)

Dark Marauder
I'll probably have it at least a year, maybe two.
I should be able to not overclock it and set the fans to a lower rpm profile and keep it pretty quiet right?

Indeed it will.

If you do gaming tho FTW3 do tend to get hotter.  Due to the many sensors the default fan profiles actually work quite well. They only go high speed when the card is on high load. No one likes a hot graphic card afterall.

This is what Kitty wants: 
 
P/N: 11G-P4-6696-KR

• 1569MHz Base Clock
• 1683MHz Boost Clock
• 351.5GT/s Texture Fill Rate
• 11264MB GDDR5X Memory
• 11016MHz Memory Clock
• 484.4GB/s Memory Bandwidth

 

Would like 11G-P4-6797-K2
 

I don't care if it winds up a little while gaming, just while mixing audio, which itself will never really tax this card. So the fans my barely spin then.

changing the thermal paste to what? like Thermal Guerrilla?

 Is that any good?

shaolinn

Dark Marauder
This is what Kitty wants: 
P/N: 11G-P4-6696-KR

• 1569MHz Base Clock
• 1683MHz Boost Clock
• 351.5GT/s Texture Fill Rate
• 11264MB GDDR5X Memory
• 11016MHz Memory Clock
• 484.4GB/s Memory Bandwidth

Hehehe I think you missed the 1080ti stock for the week tho.

What makes you say that

Cause Jacob posted a while back and people were already in the thread figured they'd have gone by now. They were also putting the cards up one by one.
 

Most "traditional" performance thermal pastes perform within a few % of each other. There are a few that tend to perform near the top of the group, but these will often interchange position from one "study" to the next. 
The studies themselves also are suspect because they are often only single application, and single run tests. The physical properties of the pastes may favor certain applications (thick or thinner) accordingly, although the impact is minimal.
 
A couple pseudo traditional style pastes may perform slightly better than all the rest, but these are generally substantially more expensive.
 
So any of the top performers are good to go. My preferences are MX-4 or Arctic Silver 5 because both are very inexpensive. 

Carbon-12
Would like 11G-P4-6797-K2
 

Good luck, they don't know if and when they will be in stock