Phil you're awesome!
I have some of those motherboards on the way, also I have a z170 with 4 PICEx16 - spacing is going to be tight for a 4 card 1080TI no riser but I'm going to run it just to see how long it can go. Should get here monday.
My new bottleneck - these stupid Corsair 750's only have 2... TWO! 4+4/6+1 power ports. The Rosewill 850w you suggested does have 4 PCIE power lines, so I just need to get some more cables that have 2 sets of 6+2's in them, I ran out. I upgraded a dozen 1070's to 1080Ti's today - hardware always takes longer than you expect. Was expecting to unscrew, unplug, swap and be done. The power cords threw me for a huge loop.
I was thinking about running power from my 1500w EVGA but I actually don't have long enough cables for that either.
So back to the drawing board.
the gigabyte board will do 3 with no risers. 1080ti 1080 ti 1070 mini
here are two builds on the biostar z170
3 with no risers 1080ti 1080 ti 1070
http://i.imgur.com/dg0TGrW.jpghttp://i.imgur.com/0YKAiAO.jpghttp://i.imgur.com/Vyc6l9f.jpgPhil, appreciate all the effort and time you put in to share your knowledge.
Almost pulling the trigger on my first build, shopping list if you can see if I am forgetting anything:
-2x MSI 1080ti FE
-1x Zotac 1070 Mini
-1x EVGA 850w Gold
-1x Gigabyte GA-Z270P
-1x Intel G4400 Skylake
-1x Crucial 4GB DDR Ram
-1x ADATA 128GB SSD
Puts the tab around $2.1k from Newegg, little more than your parts list from another thread where you were at 1950 or so.
