I asked this question to online chat and they told me to post here :) Can anyone confirm?
Confirmed. When running nvidia-smi -g 0 -dm 1 on a 1080TI that does not have a monitor plugged in, I get the following error:
Unable to set driver model for GPU 00000000:02:00.0: Not Supported.
Treating as warning and moving on.
All Done.