this video is brought to you by the Corsair obsidian 350d microatx case
exceptional expansion and cooling flexibility for compact high performance
PCS visit Corsair.com obsidian to learn
more welcome to my unboxing of the replacement for the GTX 680 this is the
GTX 780 and you guys won't be able to get a box quite like this but the
contents of yours will be very very
similar the GTX 780 is the second
graphics card to use the gk1 10 GPU this
is the same one that's used in the GeForce GTX Titan and the same one
that's used in the Tesla gpus that power
the most powerful supercomputer in the world the Titan so what I find inside
here is a special edition collectible sticker which may or may not actually
come with your retail card and I also don't find any of the accessories that
would normally come with a retail card either so normally you'd have some Molex
2 PCI Express adapters and some driver discs and all that kind of stuff this
contains absolutely nothing so don't worry too much about that because the
part that we're interested in more than anything else is this guy right here and you
might be noticing some other similarities to the Titan already
because this is one sexy graphics
card now the GTX Titan when it launched was a bit of a strange skew because it
didn't even follow the normal numbering scheme NVIDIA basically came out and
said this does not fit into our regular
product stack so we're just going to call it Titan because it performs way
better than anything else we have but it comes with a significant price premium
the GTX 780 takes that technology and brings it down to a price point that's
more in line with a regular GeForce card like what we're used to seeing in the
past so you can see here I've Illustrated on the table kind of how
this works the GTX 780 is almost as fast as a Titan has most of the same well has
almost all the same technology and is significantly faster than something like
a 680 about 35% faster not not only that
but there's a couple new things that NVIDIA is rolling out so the GeForce experience which has been in beta for a
long time now is going to be released wholesale it'll come by default
installed by default with your latest driver download that means you'll get
automatic driver downloads and you'll get suggested settings for popular games
to make sure that you're getting the most out of the hardware you're using not only that but there's going to be
some other cool features coming in GeForce experience such as Shadow play
shadowplay uses the h264 encoder that's
built into your GPU to automatically record up to 20 minutes of previous
gameplay for you to cut together and make gameplay videos what's neat about
it is that it comes with about a 5% performance hit compared to running
something like fraps which has huge files and potentially a big performance
hit and the files are already compressed so they're much smaller to deal with you
don't need a huge beefy storage subsystem so it's really cool to see
where NVIDIA is going because I know a lot of game streamers who are investing
in dedicated hardware for game streaming when it might just be a matter of buying
a GeForce GPU to record Rec your Let's Plays or gameplay videos or who who
knows I'm not promising features and video is going to deliver but let's see what they do with that very cool little
bit of tech the 780 really is intended to leave single GPU competition in the
dust but do so quietly efficiently and
it uses a dual slot form factor so unlike some of the non-reference cards
that we're likely to see it won't take up unnecessary space and it'll be
compatible with three-way or four-way SLI now all along the top of the card
you can see the two SLI connect c s that are going to give you that compatibility
the illuminated GeForce GTX logo that you can control in software and a six
pin and 8 Pin PCI Express connector on the back of the card you see display
port HDMI and two DVI ports with full support for NVIDIA surround plus an
auxiliary display and on the bottom of the card it uses PCI Express 3.0 16x for
the fastest connectivity on the back of the card we see some more of the Titan
roots of this particular graphics card because it uses the same PCB design as
the Titan see that except ah there's RAM missing so on the
back here you can see solder points for the other 3 gigs of memory that would be
on a Titan which has 6 gigs of RAM whereas the GTX 780 has 3 gigs of 6 GHz
gddr5 lengthwise the GTX 780 is exactly
the same as the Titan so there you go there's the two of them side by side how
sexy does that look uh which makes it slightly longer than a GTX 680 so you
can see that little difference there and slightly shorter than a Radeon 7970
because it's got that extra little bit of plastic shroud at the end of it there
just like the GTX Titan the car does a Marvel of industrial design oh it's so
beautiful I mean the aluminum and the fins and the just the fact that gpus
come with metal coolers now when you pay hundreds of dollars for a graphics card
and it really feels like something solid and weighty and just absolutely gorgeous
in your hand I mean that combined with the fact that the GTX logo on the top is
illuminated and you can control that making it pulsate or you can change the
intensity levels according to uh things like GPU power consumption so when
you're in games it'll be more intense when you're not in games it'll be less intense makes it a very very cool
premium feeling product to own that goes beyond just frame rates now speaking of
frame rates especially in SLI the GTX 780 compared to the competition from the
red team does deliver a smoother experience I'm not going to cover it in
full depth now but if you do a quick Google search for frame rating you'll
get a lot of information out there that might be a little bit confusing so I'm going to give you a basic overview it's
not all just about frames per second anymore it's about the consistency of
the frames per second how long was each frame on the screen that determines
whether the image appears to stutter and or whether it appears to be smooth and
NVIDIA's drivers cooperate with the hardware that they've built into their
cards to make the experience smoother particularly in multi-way
configurations because of its Kepler lineage the GTX 780 is extremely power
efficient but because it's still such a powerful graphics card it's going to
require at least a 600 wat power supply according to NVIDIA now I know from
personal experience you can get away with less than that but make sure you're
using something that is a good quality lower than that power supply
realistically anything about 450 to 500 watts if it's an extremely built power
supply will be able to handle something like a GTX 780 it inherits some other
really cool technology from the Titan as well most importantly GPU Boost 2.0 now
the old GTX 680 at sort of offensive to
call it old I guess but the GTX 680 had GPU boost which allowed the GPU to
overclock itself in response to the fact that it wasn't consuming as much power
as NVIDIA set for it as a power Target you could turn that power Target up a
little bit but this also always felt like a bit of a weird relationship to me
because the thing that kills a GPU from overclocking is heat and voltage so the
fact that GPU boost and overclocking tool didn't respond to temperature was
weird to me GPU Boost 2.0 is inherited from the Titan and responds to
temperature voltage clock speed and
power so it can do all kinds of cool stuff you can say okay uh I'm not
comfortable with the 80° Target that NVIDIA sets by default I want my GPU to
run at 70° it'll dynamically turn its clock speed voltage down in order to not
go above 70° then you can say you know what I'm comfortable with a higher
temperature I mean I'm okay with 90° and it'll turn itself up in terms of what
the power consumption it allows and the clock speed and voltage that it allows
making it actually run faster if you say you're okay with it being hotter and
it's a water coolers Delight which is very very cool so you slap a water block
on this thing tell it any temperature any power any anything is okay give it
all the voltage go for it and the card will allow itself to be at maximum clock
speed all the time and they've integrated something new in the software
they're doing something called limiting factors where it'll give you a little
indicator next to your power or your temperature or whatever else or your
voltage that says hey you've reached the max for this one this is the one holding
the card back from overclocking anymore so it's no longer guesswork so what is
the GTX 780 with 234 Cuda cor a 384-bit
bus 3 gigs of memory all the connectivity that you can pretty much
want out of extremely high-end card and coming in at a significantly lower price
point than the Titan it's basically the
premium Ultra Uber high performance card that makes more sense than something
like a Titan but is well still ultra
high performance and Uber and overclockable and all that stuff I mean you can even overclock your display
using the NVIDIA software thank you for checking out this unboxing and first
look at the GTX 780 let me know in the comments if you like our new style which
includes a little bit more glamour footage of the card and closeups and
cool stuff like that and as always guys don't forget to subscribe to lus
techtips for unboxings reviews and other computer videos