johnnygoging: second half of january and early february has deals as they try to clear stuff. more than pc. they don't do it with a ton of fanfare. keep an eye out.
I don't buy from nvidia so I don't know what the situation is with the various board partners' cards' quality and how they compare and if there's any particular cards that are regarded as being ones not to get.
double 1080 double 1080 you should never pay significantly extra just because you want the card in the very short-term. also don't pay significantly extra over the median price of a particular segment for a halo item with slightly higher clocks and not a very high increase in performance; the only things to watch out for within a single segment are cards that are known to have high failure rates or be excessively hot/noisy, or have troublesome dimensions.
OldFatGuy: This was my biggest mistake back in November when I could have had a card. I'm building this as my last rig, and trying to future proof it as much as possible and so was trying to eke out ever bit of performance I could so I was always leaning toward the cards with higher clocks.
higher clocks inside a single item's line of SKUs don't matter for shit. there isn't a big difference with the possible exception of the lowest-end cards of that particular item's line of SKUs (and when I say item, I don't mean segment. I don't mean "vega 56" or "1080"), because usually those cards also have smaller coolers and probably smaller dimensions, with the smaller pcb usually having lower-grade components. other times, those smaller-scale cards will be their own items. in many cases, you could achieve some of those factory overclocks yourself. 20mhz will only get you another frame or two at most.
perfect times to buy are rare, and largely depend on when things decide to do a larger move. people who bought 7970s got a long run out of them. people who bought 770s or 780s not as much I don't think. with AMD back in contention in CPU, and Intel throwing more cores on everything to compensate, and Intel again putting focus on developing discrete GPUs, the future looks nebulous. we just had a launch of cards with a new type of graphics memory in HBM2 with the vega 56 and 64 cards, and this year AMD will launch a 7nm card codenamed navi. I think there's think that there will be some upgrading of sandy, and ivy era systems sometime in the future. I personally think that might take a little longer. I don't think there is a lot of keenness on upgrading whether there is a reason or not.
if longevity is your goal, you may not get it with a 1080 given the competition that has arisen in the past year and the trickle of newer technologies that were delayed and them wanting people on sandy and ivy and the ilk to upgrade. the consoles will refresh in another 3 years and you're probably gonna get a bump. not to mention VR still ambles forward, gaining a bit speed as it goes along.
the switch has sold really wide, and that will hold things a bit, but they'll abandon Nintendo the second it becomes fashionable like always.
point I'm making is, you might get 3 years out of a 1080, you might not before new stuff starts to shove it aside. it all depends, and it does look like things will get a bump of the likes that makes old cards have trouble in the next few years. if Intel follows through on its GPUs this time, that's gonna make a big difference as there will be three people in the GPU space instead of just the two.
anyway as I say all this I am reminded yet again of how I dislike hardware.