EVGA graphics cards have possibly the best warranty policy. This is why I will recommend you an EVGA card (the cards in this case all have the -KR suffix and thus limited 3 year warranty). Performance-wise there is little difference (single-digit per-cents) between the cards so the precise choice doesn't matter much.
So what do you actually want from a graphics card? Raw computation power (from Nvidia because Blender uses those cards better). Now there are two ways to provide this sort of power: Use 2 cheaper cards or use one beefy card. For gaming the case is clear on the second one. In this case it's close. Two GTX 1070s would provide roughl (up to a few per cent again) the same performance as one GTX 1080 Ti. However the 1080 Ti will draw less power overall, will perform better when gaming and will also provide you with 11GB of VRAM in total as opposed to 8GB (meaning more can be stored directly in the fast memory on the card). Also a single 1080Ti will likely be cheaper, leaving more room for other components.
So now that we know what you need, which model should you get? Amazon has 6 different EVGA 1080Ti cards. 1 "founder's edition", 2 with water cooling, 3 with air cooling. The water cooled cards are >$1100 and thus too expensive. I see the founder's edition card critically because it has only one fan and will probably be quite loud becaus of the high RPM required.
This leaves us with the following three air cooled cards:
Given the minimal pricing difference here, I would actually recommend the FTW3 card, because it has 3 fans as opposed to 2, meaning it probably will be cooled better than the other two (meaning it can run faster for longer). It also features slightly higher clocks meaning it's also faster by default.
On a technical note for the other components, this cards needs 2x8-pin power connectors and claims to draw 280W. Size-wise it's at 11.8" length and standard dual-slot size, which needs to be adjusted for when picking the case.
