Hi Raddles,
Thank you for your reply and I greatly appreciate you offering to help. I'm on HFS+ as well, no plans at this time to change that... Build 17G66, like you. I guess I don't understand how the nvidia driver version numbers are related to the 10.13.66 release numbers; to a neophyte it would seem like the 387.10.10.10.40.105 for 17G65 would be the closest, or maybe 387.10.10.10.40.108 for 17G3025... or is the driver you selected chosen by being the latest nvidia driver that works with build 17G66?
I currently have a Sapphire Pulse Radeon 580 8GB installed (SKU 11265-05-20G) GDDR5 which 'worked' OOB without any changes to my basic install of 10.13.66... (audio over HDMI not working, just started to try to figure that out) system report indicates Metal, but I haven't run any tests to see if card is fully working; this card was not meant for this build, I bought it for a different workstation, but installed it in a GA-Z97X-UD5H-BK just to see if it worked. The BIOS was set with external graphics card having boot priority, but Intel graphics is still enabled; I have video on the 580 throughout the entire boot process, and onboard (intel) HDMI video + Sapphire DVI or HDMI video going dual monitors working OOB, which is very surprising to me. Like you, I have a 1080Ti (liquid-cooled) that really is the card that needs to end up in this build, I need it for the CUDA cores and performance, so that's why I'm looking for the correct Nvidia driver for this build, and I greatly appreciate any help that you (or anyone else, for that matter) can provide. The first hack I built was Snow Leopard and last hack I build was Yosemite, and a lot of changes have happened since then, Clover is new to me, as are a lot of new (to me) tools that are now mainstream, so I've got a lot of catching up to do. Biggest problem is that with all the changes in the past few years, it confusing reading the articles on this site as to which are still current and which have been deprecated by newer tools/plugins/techniques.