Nvidia Titan X (Pascal) Review

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Conclusion

Conclusion

It has been an interesting few weeks, well, three months really... GPU release after GPU release. The big one that everybody was waiting for was of course the GP102 based off GP100. With the release a little unexpected (and a little shy) Nvidia certainly did release something impressive this week. Now, you will have noticed I called the card the GeForce GTX Titan X in our charts, the reality is that the card truly is called Nvidia Titan X. Nvidia does not feel the card belongs in the GeForce gaming segment. I think differently hence tagged it as GeForce GTX Titan X, heck this card does belong in a gamers rig, the ones that game at Ultra HD will see tremendous performance and a thrilling experience, but obviously also at a tremendous 1200 USD price. Hey, they build Ferraris for a reason, these cars are about passion and come with a price tag. It's kinda like that with the Titan X, it really doesn't need to make much sense pricing wise, even at 2000 USD per card Nvidia would still be able to sell them. The naming, as far as I am concerned, is just confusing, two Titan X cards both with different GPUs. Nvidia, may I make a suggestion? Call it Titan 1000, or GeForce GTX T-1000 (yes, I am making some subtle Terminator hints here). Guys, the weird fact remains simple. The Titan X was never intended to be released and aimed solely at gamers, it's partially aimed at a pro-sumer market. The fun thing however is that the side effect is it kicks ass in gaming, big-time!
  


 

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 Aesthetics

For the Titan X series Nvidia tweaked the aesthetics of the cooler a bit more in line with the series GeForce GTX 1000 cards. They made it more mysterious looking with that nice black shell, lovely to see is the LED lighting design. The GeForce GTX logo on top is a little confusing as the card does not actually sit in the GeForce GTX line :) That surely doesn't bother me though and that see-through Plexiglass in the cooler makes it look quite nice. So I think everybody will agree with me, it's just a great looking and sturdy product. Some will dislike the fact that it does have a completely closed back-plate though (including myself). I remain skeptical about back-plates, they can trap heat and thus warm up the PCB. But the flip-side is that they do look better and can protect your PCB and components from damage. 

Cooling & Noise Levels

The cooling itself really is at the same level it was, you can't really complain about it but it's not hugely impressive either. A bit trivial of course remain the temperature targets that Nvidia is using. The default setting for the Titan X will be 80 degrees C, meaning the card is allowed to run at roughly 80 Degrees C before ramping up the fan RPM or clocking down to try to keep the product cool at 80 Degrees C. Nvidia feels this is a nice balance in-between performance, power consumption and temperatures. You can obviously change the temperature target of the fan RPM yourself, that will ramp up the noise levels badly. But at roughly 80 degrees C the noise levels are okay yet not silent. In idle you can barely hear the cooling solution (fan does not turn off though) and under stress, well, you can hear airflow. The downside of a higher temperature allowance does effect the heating of the PCB, as you can see there is a bit of heat bleeding throughout the PCB. Including the VRM area, it however remains in the 80~85 degrees C range throughout the board, and that remains to be very acceptable. The one thing that does bother me is that under full game load the temps will reach the maximum temp target of 80 Degrees C, and after that the card starts throttling. Now, that throttling is just over the 1.5 GHz advertised boost frequency. But with better cooling the card could be a notch faster alright. So the hard cold fact remains that this cooler is holding back the GPU a bit. This card and some liquid cooling would be golden really, EK already announced some blocks if you are interested.



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Power Consumption

The GP102 Pascal GPU is rated as having a 250 Watt TDP, our measurements back that up, keep in mind that this is a peak maximum value under full stress. At this performance level you are looking at 400~500 Watts for the PC in total, that is okay. We think a 650 Watt PSU would be sufficient and, if you go with 2-way SLI, an 800~900 Watt power supply is recommended. Remember, when purchasing a PSU aim to double up in Wattage as your PSU is most efficient when it is under 50% load. Here again keep in mind we measure peak power consumption, the average power consumption is a good notch lower depending on GPU utilization. Also, if you plan to overclock the CPU/memory and/or GPU with added voltage, please do purchase a power supply with enough reserve. People often underestimate it, but if you tweak all three aforementioned variables, you can easily add 200 Watts to your peak power consumption budget.

Gaming Performance

Honestly, I did not want to include 1080P results as I figured CPU limitation would be horrendously bad, well heck... it's not that bad really. From 1080P to Ultra HD the Nvidia Titan X hauls some serious numbers. But here's a paradox - the more difficult things get - the better the product will perform. E.g. Ultra HD is its true domain. Much like fine wine that ages well, that means this Titan X will last you a long time with future more GPU intensive games. This much performance and 12 GB of GDDR5X graphics memory helps you out in Ultra HD, DSR, VR and hefty complex anti-aliasing modes. That and of course the latest gaming titles. I consider this to be a very viable single GPU solution that allows you to game properly in Ultra HD with some very nice eye candy enabled with a single GPU. Drivers wise we can't complain at all, we did not stumble into any issues. Performance wise, really there's not one game that won't run seriously well at the very best image quality settings. Gaming you must do with a nice Ultra HD monitor of course, or at least a 2560x1440 screen. Now, we can discuss the advantages of a 12 GB frame-buffer, but hey, you can draw your own conclusions there. At least you won't run out of graphics memory for the years to come, right? So in that respect the card is rather future proof.

Overclocking

The boost modes can be configured with temperature targets relative to maximum power draw and your GPU Core frequency offsets. Saying that I realize it sounds complicated, but you'll have your things balanced out quite fast as these products are easy to tweak. This GPU can take a rather hefty Boost clock, once tweaked (start with +150 MHz on the GPU and a 120% power limiter) and you'll see your games rendering in the 1900 MHz domain. The memory you'll be able to get close to roughly 11 GHz effective. For a GPU with 12 Billion transistors, you've gotta be at least a tiny bit impressed, right? With our tweak we averaged out at a 1950 MHz boost frequency, touching 2 GHz!

Concluding

Dammit Jim! I like it... I really do. Now I stated already that if you are a 1080P or even 1440P gamer, you are probably and economically better off with a GeForce GTX 1070 or 1080, really. These cards just make the most sense. But I like products that do not make sense. So here we have this new revision Nvidia Titan X, armed with a huge GPU and aimed at deep learning projects with an aim at the pro-sumer. It offers features like INT8 support, shweeet for deep learning. Interestingly enough for a pro-sumer product the Titan X then doesn't support full FP64 and FP16 performance. But hey, we write for PC gamers, and for gamers that stuff isn't even slightly interesting or useful anyway as for game rendering it isn't relevant. So the gnarly side-effect of a professional series product however is that the card can render games well, VERY WELL. I am sure that everybody will dislike the 1200 USD price tag, but it's the x-factor stuff, some people do not care and just want the best. I mean this week when I wrote the news item on Titan X availability, in our forum thread on the Titan X two people had already ordered one before I had finished writing that news item! And yeah, that's the reality. True that for Ultra HD gamers and even 2560x1440 gamers this product works out well, really well. Now, you will not see double performance numbers compared to that 1080, no Sir. But think 20 to 30% additional performance on average. In the years to come games will get more demanding, and that, I assume, will work out well for the Titan X owners, as the more difficult the render jobs get, the better the Titan X is going to perform. But I know and also understand very well that most of you can't look away from the price-tag, hey, it's common sense kicking you in the proverbial nuts, right? In the end we can discuss pricing all day long, but it doesn't shy away from the fact that the Nvidia Titan X is a product with grandeur and a terrific coolness factor. Overall the product is impressive and has great aesthetics with the all dark looks. We do hope to see a card with that other small extension, like GeForce GTX 1080 Ti, eh? This is the uber-enthusiast game, it is the black painted Ferrari among graphics cards and as niche and expensive as it gets. People love this stuff regardless of the fact they can't afford it. The NVIDIA Titan X Pascal is available directly and only from NVIDIA in their on-line webshop, do not expect AIB partner cards as there will not be any customized models. You will however see a handful of system integrators offering the 2016 edition Titan X as an optional part in pre-built systems. The Nvidia Titan X is available to purchase from your localized GeForce.com website. 

We bow to the new revision X as it is a top notch product, all hail the new king in town.

 - H

We have written an extended overclock article (with benchmarks included) right here.

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