Shane Cooney

From looking at the specs on the MSI website for that particular board which is obviously ITX it doesnt look like it, but I am happy to be corrected.

The Z370 chipset has upto 24 PCI lanes available dependent on motherboard manufacturer so you should have no issues whatsoever throwing a m.2 onto the board.

You have kind of answered your own question. On low settings you aren't asking much of the 1080 so naturally it it wont stress the GPU as much so less usage of the GPU.
 
Once you turn the settings up-to epic you aren't pretty much turning everything up and utilizing the card to its full potential.
 
You also have to remember that a 144Hz monitor will only actually display 144FPS +or- a few FPS even though the card may be outputting 150+FPS
 
So in general.... don't worry about it. The card is performing just fine and you are getting pretty well the max that the monitor is able to display anyway.

That's more like it. Good job.

I think I have reached the limit of the card.
 
Cleaned out the blower and new thermal paste on the die which brought temps down but just cant seem to squeeze anything more out of it without Unigine crashing.
 

Could very well be....
 
Im not really attached to the card but obviously wouldnt want to kill it but will push it as hard as I feel comfortable with.
 
Might do some other cooling tricks, maybe pull it apart and clean it out and change out the thermal paste etc. Maybe custom Bios if I have some time as well.

You should be able to go faster than my GTX 660 result. Even though my 660 was overclocked by quite some margin (on the blower!), I can't escape the core advantage that you have.
 
Give OC a shot and see what's up maybe?