GeForce GTX 780 review - Article

GeForce GTX 780 3GB - The Wrath of The Titan!

There has been a lot of chatter in the graphics arena as to what both AMD and NVIDIA are doing for the 2013 lineup of products. With the global economy at an all-time low both manufacturers have been slowing down their development cycles in order to safe on R&D. But, to not release now products will stall sales, as hey... why should anybody upgrade? In the upcoming weeks or so we'll be seeing two new products from NVIDIA, both are sort of refreshes with the one today being a SKU based on geForce GTX Titan, in another jacket. It is the much discussed GeForce GTX 780. The GeForce GTX 780 is NVIDIAs all new high-end graphics card based in their Flagship product, the GTX Titan. This means it is based on the GK110 GPU and has an whopping 7.1 Billion transistors. That makes it a nice chunk faster opposed to the  GeForce GTX 680 GPU. We test the product with the hottest games like Metro: Last light, Battlefield 3, Sleeping Dogs, Far Cry 3, Medal of Honor Warfighter, Hitman Absolution and many more. 

Just like Titan, the GTX 780 is based on the GK110 GPU with the distinctions that the Titan has a GK110-300 GPU and the GeForce GTX 780 a GK110-400 GPU. Same stuff, yet with some things disabled. But we are a bit surprized to see NVIDIA move forward with GK110, See, the GK110 chip is BIG, and that makes it a difficult chip to bake, its recipe is refined though as the product has 2304 Shader Processing Units, 192 TMUs and 32 ROPs on a 384-bit memory interface of fast GDDR5. So yeah, NVIDIA trimmed down that that 45 mm × 45 mm 2397-pin S-FCBGA Titian with its 2688 shader/stream/CUDA processors a bit.

Memory wise you are looking at 3GB over 6 GB, that is still huge (12 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. 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 is 863 MHz with a boost clock of 900 MHz. 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. 

But let's say hello to Titan's little brother first, say hello to the GeForce GTX 780.