Gigabyte GeForce GTX Titan Black WindForce review - Introduction

Meet the Alpha Prime...

We review the Gigabyte GeForce GTX Titan Black WindForce GHz edition. You take the reference product, arm it with a custom WindForce cooler and you receive a 6GB Titan Black that has been factory overclocked towards 1111 MHz on the boost clock for you. How on this Earth is that not very interesting? A while ago Nvidia launched the GeForce GTX Titan Black. We never reviewed it as it was supposed to be solely a professional series product, not intended for gamers. Nvidia's board partners however have been rereleasing this product as a gaming product, as well as Nvidia who have been plugging the product in the gaming benchmarks on their own website ever since Watch Dogs was released. As such, we figured we need to review this puppy as well.

For those that wonder what is different in-between all the high-end enthusiast products from Nvidia, really it is all rather simple. The Titan Black is the Geforce GTX 780 Ti, with two differences:

1. It has 6 GB instead of 3 GB memory
2. It has double precision enabled (totally unimportant for gamers).

So yeah, this is the reason you don't see any 780 Ti 6GB SKUs as it would kill the Titan Black edition market space that it occupies. Memory wise NVIDIA equipped the GeForce GTX Titan Black with 7 Gbps memory, the fastest GDDR5 memory you can find on a graphics card today. The GeForce Titan Black ships with a total of 6 GB of this memory, providing up to 336 GB/sec of peak memory bandwidth. That is a huge partition of memory for one GPU alright. Combined with GPU Boost 2.0 you will see the reference card boosting towards the 980 MHz range. The reference clock for Titan Black is 889 MHz. The clocks need to remain low for the card to be able to deal with the heat these GPUs produce, but it is also done to keep the product in line power consumption wise. For the GeForce GTX Titan Black, monitor outputs include Dual-DVI, HDMI and DisplayPort outputs. Will we be able to play the hottest games at that whopping Ultra HD 8.2 Mpixels at a 3840x2160 resolution @ 60 Hz? Well, head over to the next page where we'll start-up the technology overview first, but not before you have seen the product though.

But let's say hello to the GeForce GTX Titan Black from Gigabyte. The latest revision of the cooler will be used, and that one offers a whopping 600W of cooling power. There is a nag though, you must install the cooler yourself as Nvidia really doesn't like to put custom designed products out there. Easy work really as we will show you, but removing a fan always comes with a little risk.

The Titan Black comes with 6 GB of GDDR5 memory at a clock frequency of 7,000 MHz, the GPU has higher than stock clocks - the base clock is 1006 MHz (up from 889 MHz) while the boost clock is 1111 MHz (980 MHz stock). The rest of the specs are defaulted at 2880 CUDA Cores, a 384-bit memory interface, 6-pin and 8-pin PCIe power connectors, and dual-DVI, HDMI and DisplayPort outputs. Looking at the specs you must think that this product must consume heaps of power; well it's not fantastic sure, 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. We'll fire off the hottest games like Battlefield 4, Thief and Watch Dogs at the card. Look below, have a peek at that lovely, but at 900 EURO a very expensive, piece of technology. Let's fire up this article. Head onwards into the review.

The card comes with a reference cooler - you will need to apply the WindForce cooler yourself.