Gainward GTX Titan
Introduction and Technical Specifications
Published: 11th March 2013 | Source: Gainward | Price: �£834.95 |
Introduction
Just when you thought that all had settled down in the world of graphics cards, with the nVidia GTX680 and the AMD Radeon HD7970 almost inseparable, along comes a new card from nVidia. Freed from the restrictions of a number, it's interesting to see what the Titan has to offer.
Come with us for a moment down the meandering path that leads to the rumour mill.
The battle between nVidia and AMD has swung both ways in recent years. AMD have had some awesome cards, such as the HD5870 and the HD7970, and some duffers (HD6970). nVidia haven't been freed from that either, as anyone who brought the turbine barbecue disguised as a GTX480 can attest. The GTX580 won the most recent battle and when AMD returned with the HD7970 we all wondered what nVidia would bring to the table.
We heard word that the newest Kepler chip was a complete stormer, that it was going to annihilate whatever AMD had conjured up. Then it all went rather quiet. There was a bit of a lull and finally the GK104 powered GTX680 appeared, nearly identical in performance to its red team competition. Whisper went round that this was deliberately engineered to be so, that nVidia had produced something that would keep them in the game without leaving themselves nowhere to go in the immediate future. Certainly it's not great for the consumer if this is the case, but it makes good business sense.
So in a lot of ways it's no great surprise to find ourselves in possession of a new GPU from nVidia, the GK110 'Kepler' powered GTX Titan. This is assuredly what nVidia had in the R&D department when the HD7970 appeared. Indeed it was a suite of these that were a key part of the Cray-built Titan Supercomputer, a 17 petaflop behemoth. Each node of the Titan Supercomputer had an Opteron CPU, as well as a nVidia Tesla K20X GPU tied to 6GB of GDDR5. The K20X was a GK110 in the Tesla naming convention. All of which lengthy preamble explains why today's review is of a GK110 powered GPU with 6GB of GDDR5 and named the GTX Titan, in honour of the supercomputer that was the testbed for our card.
The vastly expensive world of the supercomputer could bring the well-heeled of us a graphics card to redefine how much power we thought we could put in our own PCs.
Technical Specifications
As with most graphics cards, the technical specifications don't reveal all the secrets. However, there are a couple of things that are worth noting.
Firstly the Titan has a whopping 2688 CUDA Cores on board. To put that into perspective the GTX680 had 1536. Quite the leap in potential performance.
Secondly whereas the GTX680 used two 6pin power inputs and had a TDP of 195W, the Titan reverts back to the GTX580 arrangement of a 6pin and 8pin power input (side by side again) and the TDP is back up to the full 250W. Just in case you had any doubts about the cut-down nature of the GTX680.
Most Recent Comments
I know it would be unbalanced in terms of CPU/GPU , but if you aren't interested in benchmarking a 3770k with a h100i and this in a betfenix prodigy is perhaps the ultimate single screen gaming rig , small, cool , quiet.
For me thats probably the perfect system.
thanks for the clarification - But what a video to see, 1 hour and 24 mins, a good break after 10 hours of work
/edit
4 times! not counting the ones in crysis 3
And if you could send me back the Titan as soon as, that would be great
But it was very interesting. It compared the titan to a quadro gpu. The titan is apparently a very good deal for applications where you need a load of ram and cuda cores. This would make sense.
So should this be branded as an entry level quadro card?
I mean if you look at the pricing of a quadro card with 6GB of ram Clicky Then having triple SLI titans, (or even a single titan might be enough,) seems like a better deal.
so much better than the 10 minutes stuff so certain people upload
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Originally Posted by Cru3L139
great review as always, love your long videos
so much better than the 10 minutes stuff so certain people upload |
However, and I hate to be the fuddy-duddy, the language, does come across as a little bit unprofessional and I think some companies that supply you with goodies may start to have an issue with it if it becomes regular.
Plus you have to think that you may be getting younger viewers, who probably know more swear words than us adults however parents walking past their young kids computer and hearing it might take offence.
Personally, doesn't really bother me but devil's advocate and all that.
Edit:
Just to add though. great card but I wish nVidia would start and listen to consumers regarding LED lighting and use RGB. I understand that yes green is representative of the company but for those that take the time in choosing a colour scheme for their rig it's annoying that one component can't match in.
Keep them coming..................
After the feature film to show off the titan, 1 hour 26mins. if I remember correctly indeed was showing great stuff as in features and the power engineered into just one nVidia card, well so far it's unrivaled.
This leaves me (a lot) diss-heartened as I bought the nVidia EVGA version of the GTX690, as I only just bought it weeks before the titan card came out/even knew about it.
Where I'm going with this is it was a smart marketing play by nVidia
but my next GPU purchase will be a good 2 ATI's (FirePro's) or a top of the range Quadro (which I will be sure to check its the only one for a while to come/industry-wise!).
Otherwise the money grabbing gits at nVidia will keep making these kind of cards for gaming and might end up charging £2000+ for one, simply because they're being bought (great cards, credit to them) ATI will catch up and show no mercy, win in the battle for the best gaming card I'll bet money on that!
But paying out that kind of money for a graphics card? Yes it's awesome, yes TTL got in the first best review, but that kind of cash, it can field a whole system if you buy smart, simple.
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Originally Posted by 2Dcypher
So Tinytomlogan, our Guv. Got his mitts on the TITAN 6GB GPU the kool accommodating staff too hopefully.
After the feature film to show off the titan, 1 hour 26mins. if I remember correctly indeed was showing great stuff as in features and the power engineered into just one nVidia card, well so far it's unrivaled. This leaves me (a lot) diss-heartened as I bought the nVidia EVGA version of the GTX690, as I only just bought it weeks before the titan card came out/even knew about it. Where I'm going with this is it was a smart marketing play by nVidia but my next GPU purchase will be a good 2 ATI's (FirePro's) or a top of the range Quadro (which I will be sure to check its the only one for a while to come/industry-wise!). Otherwise the money grabbing gits at nVidia will keep making these kind of cards for gaming and might end up charging £2000+ for one, simply because they're being bought (great cards, credit to them) ATI will catch up and show no mercy, win in the battle for the best gaming card I'll bet money on that! But paying out that kind of money for a graphics card? Yes it's awesome, yes TTL got in the first best review, but that kind of cash, it can field a whole system if you buy smart, simples. |
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Originally Posted by SeekaX
something is messed up here
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It's perfectly OK to rebadge a failed Tesla card and ask £1000 for it.
All our love,
Your faithful (and rather stupid) audience.
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Originally Posted by 2Dcypher
1 word, what?
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Evin funny! Funny cheeky grin time everybody
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Originally Posted by 2Dcypher
1 word, what?
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I feal dummer for doing so
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Originally Posted by 2Dcypher
Is it a coincidence or is that avatar a still frame of Tom there?? lol
Evin funny! Funny cheeky grin time everybody |
I built my current rig in Nov last year with the plan of upgrading the GPU to 1 or 2 780's or what ever the top performing next gen/architecture card was. I even planned for stupid prices of about 35% more the the MOST expensive single core cards out at the time. That worked out at about £650. So if it cost £650 ..1 card, if it cost £400 i would push to 2 cards. I knew Nvidia would be expensive so why not plan ahead.
But damn ..Nvidia really pulled a number on us, the cheapest u can find these cards is £830 ....'ridiculous' just doesnt quiet mean enough in this case lol.
Pitty really, the Titan wont get the sales it deserves imo, even those with LGA 2011 rigs probably wont stomach spending that much on a single core card..i know i wont.
I for one will now have to wait for the 780 which will likely be within the price range i originaly planed on..it just wont be the 'flagship' model i wanted
.. owell such is life. I deffinatly need a upgrade this year so its gunna have to be Nvidia since AMD wont be releasing anyting till next year...i wanna play Crysis 3 but im holding off becouse i just know my 560ti will get a proper thrashing trying to play it otherwise :PAnyway nice review
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Originally Posted by SolarNova
Pitty really, the Titan wont get the sales it deserves imo, even those with LGA 2011 rigs probably wont stomach spending that much on a single core card..i know i wont.
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I wouldn't mind but you can set up a SLI arrangement for around £500 and beat it easily.
the price tag is massive but the card just looks stunning and the performence is proper aswell
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Originally Posted by Solanos
What i would like to see as an addition to this long review is a power consumption benchmark. I mean a single core card with a TDP of 250Watts must be much lower than 2 Crossfire/SLI overclocked cards right? So performance wise we have the fastest single core card that costs a ton of money, hmmm I think I can live with an overclocked GTX670 that runs Crysis 3 @ 1080p maxed out @30-45 FPS.
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Times like this I miss 'Doom', no I'm happy enough with a rig build in process no titan for moi just the very cool GeForce GTX690, takes up little energy, not watercooling it as the body is just so cool, and chuck on the backplate from EVGA.
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Originally Posted by AlienALX
Dear Nvidia.
It's perfectly OK to rebadge a failed Tesla card and ask £1000 for it. All our love, Your faithful (and rather stupid) audience. |
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Originally Posted by 2Dcypher
Maybe I'm being ignorant but just why would you overclock the most powerful GPU on the market to date?
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BTW Crysis 3 with everything max out and Motion Blure High killing this card
So is it safe, or not ?
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