GPU Upgrade - Should I go all out?

[Nuck_Chorris]

I've been looking to upgrade to a 2080 Ti for a month or so now. I've always bought EVGA products and have never had any issue with them, but EVGA has quite a few SKUs for the 2080 Ti and I'm having trouble deciding which one will meet my needs/be best for me.

 

My two options are the FTW3 Ultra and the Black. From what I've seen in benchmarks, the FTW3 Ultra only comes in a few frames ahead of the Black card in most games (stock clocks on both cards). Is the FTW3 Ultra worth the extra $350-400? I usually put a mild overclock on my cards, but I'm by no means a OC nerd. Any thoughts?

[Fasauceome]

In terms of value, the higher end versions are rarely worth it. The FTW3 has a better cooler and all, so if you love quieter operations and such it's the aim of it, but the Black certainly does its job and does it well.

[Nuck_Chorris]

1 minute ago, Fasauceome said:

In terms of value, the higher end versions are rarely worth it. The FTW3 has a better cooler and all, so if you love quieter operations and such it's the aim of it, but the Black certainly does its job and does it well.

Like I said, I'm going to be doing a custom liquid cooling loop on the system once I upgrade the video card, so I'm not too worried about noise/heat levels. Thanks for the input!

[Oalei]

7 minutes ago, Nuck_Chorris said:

Like I said, I'm going to be doing a custom liquid cooling loop on the system once I upgrade the video card, so I'm not too worried about noise/heat levels. Thanks for the input!

Well the higher binned Nvidia chip is the way to go. 

[hollyh88]

11 hours ago, Nuck_Chorris said:

I've been looking to upgrade to a 2080 Ti for a month or so now. I've always bought EVGA products and have never had any issue with them, but EVGA has quite a few SKUs for the 2080 Ti and I'm having trouble deciding which one will meet my needs/be best for me.

 

My two options are the FTW3 Ultra and the Black. From what I've seen in benchmarks, the FTW3 Ultra only comes in a few frames ahead of the Black card in most games (stock clocks on both cards). Is the FTW3 Ultra worth the extra $350-400? I usually put a mild overclock on my cards, but I'm by no means a OC nerd. Any thoughts?

evga does save their best chips that they get from nvidia for the FTW series card. so it can generally perform better and if you want to oc later (not that you would need to for a few years) it will do better than the black. 

But it all comes down to whether you want to spend way more on it.