GeForce GTX Titan review - Article

GeForce GTX Titan 6GB - The fastest GPU you have ever seen

Hey there my man, today is the day that we finally can unleash the performance numbers of that product you've been hearing about a lot these days. The GeForce GTX Titan, a card that to date is Nvidia's fastest single GPU based graphics card that Nvidia has ever built. It is based on the GK110 GPU and is as such is closing in on one GeForce GTX 690 with two GTX 680 GPUs. For those that do not recognize the GK110 chip codename, this was a GPU launched many months ago and ended up in Nvidia's professional Tesla K20X series of products. 

Before I continue with the introduction, due to the number of cards and stuff we have to talk about, we have split up the content in separate articles, otherwise we'd end up with one 75 pages article. Below an overview of our three must read articles.

• GeForce GTX Titan Reference review (this article)
• GeForce GTX Titan 3-way SLI and Multi monitor review
• GeForce GTX Titan Overclock review

Alright, crunch time! So here's a small secret, initially roughly a year ago we expected the GK110 chip to be launching in the GeForce GTX 680, but the GK104 currently in use for GeForce GTX 680 was, simply put, just too good and yielded so much better. See the GK110 chip is HUGE, and that makes it a difficult chip to bake, its recipe is so sweet though. So it made a lot of sense for Nvidia to wait as long as possible to release this chip once wafer yields would improve and the fabrication processes more refined.

Currently it is February 2013, we have just seen the first dual-GPU Radeon HD 7970 based graphics cards and let's be realistic, tremendous performance gains for the Radeon 7970 series products at driver level, and that pushed that oh-so important competing performance advantage upwards. Now that works both ways, Nvidia found a lot of extra performance in their drivers as well. But with an equal playing field, the Crysis 3 and a Playstation 4 announcement all in February, Nvidia figured, let's introduce a GK110 SKU into the market.

So the green colored scientists and engineers had a gathering, the aim... make an incredible tweakable product that is silent and is a product that will offer the best single GPU performance on the globe. Oh and they wanted it to look silly cool as well.

Well the crew went to work and boom, mission accomplished. They planted that 45 mm × 45 mm 2397-pin S-FCBGA chip with its 2688 shader/stream/CUDA processors onto a great design PCB, tucked 6 GB (24 pieces of 64M ×16 GDDR5 SDRAM) of memory (384-bit) on there and started designing a bunch of new tricks at BIOS and driver level. I mention this specifically as the Geforce GTX Titan has been designed to overclock. The AIB partners will be allowed to offer voltage unlocked SKUs. And combined with GPU Boost 2.0 you will see this product boosting towards the 1100~1150 MHz range once you tweak it. The reference clock however is 836 MHz with a boost clock of 876 MHz. However, tweaked... we got it running at 1176 MHz my man.

Looking at the specs you must think that this product must consume heaps of power, well it's not great, but definitely not bad at all. The maximum allowed board design power draw is roughly 250 Watt, which considering what this product is, is good.

Not in this review, but in another separate article, we will test the product on one, two and three monitors in Surround view with the hottest games like Battlefield 3, Sleeping Dogs, Far Cry 3, Medal of Honor Warfighter, Hitman Absolution and many more. Next to that with the three samples we have at hand we'll be looking at SLI performance scaling as well!

Look below, have a peek at that gorgeous piece of technology... and then let's fire up this article. Meet the cute little fellah, goodness I'm getting all movie buffed: this is Spartaa... Titaaaaan!