GeForce GTX Titan preview - Article

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

Yes, finally the GeForce GTX Titan is launching, well almost... 

Update: the final reviews are ready, you can find them here:

• GeForce GTX Titan Reference review
• GeForce GTX Titan 3-way SLI and Multi monitor review
• GeForce GTX Titan Overclock guide slash review

Before we begin, please read this carefully. The full reviews for GeForce GTX Titan SHOULD have been released today. That was the plan, however NVIDIA had a very hard time getting the boards out to reviewers in time and, three days before launch, the driver was still not ready. Hence NVIDIA decided to split this release up in an announcement (news) to be published today, then this Thursday upcoming we will be allowed to publish benchmark results. We've got three boards so you are in for a royal treat alright.

Today, Tuesday the 19th 2013, we start off with the preview, actually the first part of the reference review without any benchmarks. This will show you an overview of the GPU technology, features and some nice photos as the card certainly is a looker.

The GeForce GTX Titan is, to date, NVIDIA's fastest single GPU based graphics card they have ever built. It is based on the GK110 GPU and as such is nearly as fast as 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 sheer amount of features we have to talk about we have split the content up into three separate articles, otherwise we'd end up with one 75 page article.

• GeForce GTX Titan preview (released)
• GeForce GTX Titan Reference review (Thursday)
• GeForce GTX Titan 3-way SLI and multi-monitor review (Thursday)
• GeForce GTX Titan Overclock review (Thursday/Friday)

Alright, crunch time. So here's a small secret, initially roughly a year ago we expected the GK110 chip to be launched in the GeForce GTX 680, but the GK104 currently in use for that 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. So it made a lot of sense for NVIDIA to wait as long as possible to release this chip once wafer yields were improved and the fabrication processes more refined.

Currently it is late 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, with the Crysis 3 and Playstation 4 announcement both 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 incredibly 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 PCB design, 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'd 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 Watts, which considering what this product is, is good.

Not in this preview yet in our final reviews we will test the product on one 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!