Strix 1080 Ti not the best?

[nightstrike]

So I ordered my O11G (despite owning an O8G that was a serious silicon lottery win), but I was a little disappointed to see that this time around, the Strix isn't the fastest. So I'm curious... why did Asus take second place this time around to Gigabyte?

http://www.gigabyte.us/Graphics-Card/GV-N108TAORUS-X-11GD#kf

Now, I personally don't have any need for the extra HDMI ports, but the front panel thing is a nice touch for VR users. I really like front panel gadgets of any kind, typically. But teh higher factory OC including a sizable memory clock boost is impressive. Now, I don't at all doubt the ability of ASUS engineering, a group that is almost always #1. So why the loss here? Is it a stability or perhaps a QC issue? On quality, there's another interesting side note that Gigabyte provides a 4 year warranty instead of 3. That's something to really think about here, Asus.

[panzlock]

These are stock factory clocks and don't really matter much from brand to brand. You can easily OC the Strix to the same clock speed as the Gigabyte version and well beyond that, as well. What matters here is the cooling and of course the silicon lottery for OC potential.

The Strix is not worse than other, slightly faster VGA's. It's just clocked slower out of the box.

[JustinThyme]

Its all a matter of preference. Front panel anything is clutter to me.
You should really check up on the specs of other manufacturers because as much as I hate to do it I have to burst your bubble as neither of the two mentioned had had the top dog spot on any Nvidia card for a few generations, Zotac has squeezed out by a narrow margin in the factory configs and its no different with the 1080Ti as the ZOTAC GTX 1080 Ti PGF Extreme OC tops the Gigabyte.

We are talking core clock boots between the 3 being a pretty tight race.
reference clock is 1480

Boost clocks
Asus 1708
GigaB 1721
Zotac 1733

Taken from 3rd party reviewer, not the manufacturers fluff and stuff pages.

Give it some time and lets see where the chips fall, This is brand new and not many samples are on the street yet.
What fluff says and what the real world shows are completely different stories. User benches and overclockability will tell the tale.