Founders cards used to cost $100 more and you could justify buying a FTW card but not anymore.   My last 1080 FTW was a terrible overclocking card and its really not worth the extra money. 
 
I am certainly not going FTW this time. 

Avolate
Founders cards used to cost $100 more and you could justify buying a FTW card but not anymore.   My last 1080 FTW was a terrible overclocking card and its really not worth the extra money. 
 I am certainly not going FTW this time. 

Errrrmm...
You can't go for anything right now except bstock.

FTW isn't a terrible overclocking card lol. The FTW cards are already overclocked at EVGA. They are the silicon that they've binned as higher performing and so they OC them and sell them as the higher end card. You not being able to clock it more than it already is doesn't change that fact. FTW is a guaranteed OC'd card vs a lower sku that might not be stable at the same factory OC as an FTW.
 
The base clock of a 3080 is 1400 and the boost clock is 1700 "guarantee" the FTW is 1800 boost guarantee and will mostly boost to the 1900s. Buying a lower end card is fine, but EVGA is going to use the higher performing silicon to fill their higher end skus which means your lower end sku is less likely to hit 1800s stable.
 
Considering they even have a sku that boosts to 1755 shows that the 1800 boosting sku is definitely going to be the higher performing silicon here. That's a whole extra tier for just 45MHz. The XC3 cards probably are pretty close to their limit already.

RainStryke

Avolate
Founders cards used to cost $100 more and you could justify buying a FTW card but not anymore.   My last 1080 FTW was a terrible overclocking card and its really not worth the extra money. 
 
I am certainly not going FTW this time. 

Luck of the draw on the silicon lottery, I had a few of the GTX 1080 FTW cards. I got lucky with my first one, the second one was not that great. If you love to overclock, no reason to get a factory overclocked card unless you need one with a higher power limit than the reference. In the past, I always purchased the factory overclocked cards because I wanted my base-line clock speeds to be fast enough I don't feel like I need to overclock. But really, I am enjoying the reference cards since I jumped into custom water cooling.

Cooling was a big factor with the 1080 FTW, unless you had it on water you cannot expect much more head room. I was able to get 2100Mhz core and +500 on the memory and its been rock stable for years at those speeds. But if the temperature was too high it would be become unstable, my card always ran at 45C under load.