I'm sure I can squeeze some extra out of it with a bit lower on the core clock and a reasonable bump on the memory.

I think I'll go back to playing with my curve which on page 14 several posters have gone back to and seen better performance than the Asus one they were playing with. I'm going to keep reading the thread a few pages a night and see what the more recent posts have to say and will update if anything comes out of it. His posts are not always the most clear hah. The original poster there was on XOC posting decent clocks but currently appears to have gone back on stock for stability and performance. I just don't want to pull of my water block right now or risk killing the card so soon in its life cycle and I'm not pulling a monitor out. For stock BIOS's based on a reference design the shunt mod appears to be working for additional power. I'm 14 pages in and so far the Asus Strix bios most people were using does kill DP 1 on FE cards due to the positioning of the HDMI port so no go there (for me) not to mention at this point in my reading they are saying it really does not improve anything just trying to trick the sensors into believing it is not at the power limit but they were seeing lower performance than stock.

Msi afterburner gtx 1080