Nvidia GeForce GTX Titan-Z review - Introduction

Hello GeForce GTX Titan-Z Newman...

We review the dual-GPU GeForce GTX Titan Z. The card is much talked about as Nvidia introduced the product at prices that are incredibly steep, and then, much like the Titan Black, Nvidia refused to send out samples to the media. To this day that fact has remained the same, however once cards get into retail they inevitably will end up with the media regardless of what Nvidia wants. We had to pull a string or two here and there, but we are proud to report that today we will review the GeForce GTX Titan Z. A card that created a lot of controversy, as such we'll go in-depth once again to see whether or not this 2850 EUR product even has a chance to compete with the 1300 EUR AMD Radeon R9 295x2. We test the product with the hottest games like Thief, Watch Dogs, Battlefield 4 and many more. We'll look at Ultra HD gaming, thermal imaging and heat response, we'll overclock it, we'll fire off FCAT at it. In short, you are in for a 30 page treat today.

So what exactly is the Titan Z? Well, just like the GeForce GTX Titan Black and the GeForce GTX 780 Ti, the GeForce GTX Titan Z is based on two GK110 GPUs with the distinction that it has been plastered onto one PCB and covered with a humongous 3-slot cooler. The Silicons in use are based on GK110-400 GPUs, same stuff as the aforementioned cards, yet with minor changes. The recipe for the GTX Titan Z is impressive though, as the product has the full 15 Streaming clusters, thus 2880 Shader Processing Units per GPU, enabled. That's 240 TMUs and 48 ROPs on a 384-bit memory interface of fast 6GB GDDR5 allocated per GPU. So you can double that up. But in a nutshell the card uses two 45 mm × 45 mm 2397-pin S-FCBGA GK110b GPUs with 2880 shader/stream/CUDA processors -- thus 5760 Shader processors. This will give the GeForce Titan Z a cool 8 TeraFLOPS of performance.

Memory wise NVIDIA equipped the GeForce GTX Titan Z with 7 Gbps memory, the fastest GDDR5 memory you can find on a graphics card today. The GeForce Titan Z ships with a total of 12 GB of this memory, providing up to 336 GB/sec (x2) of peak memory bandwidth. That is a huge partition of memory, yet do realise that each GPU can address a maximum of 6 GB only. Combined with GPU Boost 2.0 you will see this product boosting towards the 876 MHz range. The reference clock for Titan Z is kept low at 705 MHz. The clocks need to remain low for the card to be able to deal with the intense heat two GPUs produce, but it is also done to keep the product in line power consumption wise. For the GeForce GTX Titan Z, 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 Z from Nvidia first. This is the 12 GB model (well 2x 6 GB really). Have a peek at the product we test today and then head onwards into the review.

Got cash to burn? Roughly three big ones and it's yours... that's 2850 EUR / 2999 USD.