welcome to my NVIDIA GeForce GTX Titan
unboxing this has a completely different naming scheme as you can see I have
already actually broken the seal once but we had a bit of an error due to a uh
an errant baby that was running around our video set so we had some
difficulties with that but we're going to open this bad boy up and I really do
mean bad boy this is the fastest single
GPU card on the planet it comes packed
in beautiful anti-static foam with a
beautiful bubble wrap that is carefully painstakingly labeled card 4 and then
more bubble wrap inside for your $1,000
you get the best packaging that has ever been no I'm just kidding so this is a
reference board provided by NVIDIA rather than being one that's made by an
add-in board partner such as uh EVGA or
ASUS which are going to be the ones for Titan in North
America so you will get a proper retail package with a proper warranty and all
of that but this one is just for benchmarking buy yours truly so the
first thing you're probably going to notice about the Titan is that it is
absolutely gorgeous it is styled similarly to the GeForce GTX 690 with an
extruded aluminum casing here noise
dampened fan just like the GP GTX 680
and a polycarbonate window that shows you the extended fin stack that is
actually on top of a vapor chamber
cooler that covers the GPU itself this card has six gigs of memory now
something that people have complained about in the past particularly with the
GTX 690 is not enough frame buffer on
the high-end cards so NVIDIA wanted to address this because a 690 has 4 gigs of
memory which is two per GPU so two effective cuz you're running an SLI the
Titan has 6 gigs so that means that these four display outputs here which
can be run in 3+ one so three in NVIDIA
surround and one additional one as an auxiliary display can all be powered at
Next Generation resolution so this card is capable in a three-way SLI
configuration of even running games like Crisis 3 at 5760 by 1080 with very high
details on so let's flip the board over so there's some RAM on this side and to
fit 6 gigs of memory on a board obviously you're going to have to put
some memory on the top of it as well so I'm not going to let the baby touch the
back of the card CU I'm sure that would be a bit of a problem so it has a
384-bit bus this is similar to previous generation NVIDIA high-end cards such as
the GTX 480 and what other technology we
do we get inside so aside from all that there are some
pretty serious improvements to the main feature that NVIDIA launched with
GeForce GTX 680 so code named Kepler now
this is more like Kepler on steroids because compared to around 1,500 caor
which is what a 680 has the Titan has
2,688 Cuda cor so in addition to just
being a Titan and being generally Beast it introduces a new version of GPU boost
so GPU boost was what NVIDIA was calling their automatic overclocking it was a
dynamic change of how the card operated
in terms of its clock speeds its volt and its voltages so according to a power
Target so they set a power Target for how much power the board was allowed to
draw NVIDIA went oh okay well as long as you're under that power Target we can
ramp up the GPU clock so you'd actually get faster performance so NVIDIA started
rating their cards for a uh a minimum
speed as well as a sort of typical boost
clock now the problem with that is that board power is not necess necessarily
the only Factor there's also temperatures so board temperatures play
an important role in the reliability of the GPU so NVIDIA went okay well let's
do GPU Boost 2.0 GPU Boost 2.0 doesn't
rely on the actual power that the board is drawing it relies on the temperature
that the GPU is running at so water coolers for example would run their GTX
680 with a water block on it so it would always be at a very low temperature but
you'd reach that that uh that power draw
limit it so what happened was the card would stop boosting up it would stop
overclocking any further Titan will not
have that issue if you keep the temperatures low Titan will overclock
itself very significantly so the base clock for this guy is 836 MHz with a
typical boost clock of 876 MHz however I've been told that a
water cooled Titan without any further tweaking without any overclocking like
manual overclocking would be expected to run anywhere from around 950 MHz to 1
GHz having done nothing because it will dynamically see that the card is not
reaching a temperature that's going to bother it and it'll continue to add more
voltage and more clock speed to the card until you reach that limit now another
thing about the maximum voltage for the card NVIDIA has completely overhauled
the way that they handle voltage increases and overclocking you can
actually go beyond NVIDIA's recommend
maximum voltage for GPU reliability this has to be enabled by the addin board
partner but it'll give you a warning an EVGA Precision or MSI afterburner any of
those utilities that says look this will affect the long-term stability of your
card are you sure you want to do this and if you say yeah go for it it'll let
you push it harder and further than NVIDIA has ever really allowed their
customers to do in the past past that
reliability point so uh oh yes
customizability so not only that that but GPU boost 2 actually enables some
further customization so you can control everything from the fan profile to the
maximum voltage to the clock speed so what that means is you can say look I'm
comfortable with 90° I'm going to set a Target temperature of 90° and unlike a
power based uh like a power-based Target
it's not approximate anymore the fan will ramp up as soon as it hits that 90°
Target or 80° which is what it ships at or even 70° this allows the card to say
okay that's the temperature the user wants to run at so it can dynamically
adjust the clock speed and the voltage of the card to make sure it runs at that
temperature so what's the application of this well you could do a couple things
you could say okay I'm comfortable with the GPU having less performance and I
want it to run at 70° and I want it to be silent so that means what it'll do is
it'll set your fan to spin very very very slow until you hit 70° and then at
70° instead of ramping up the fan and compensate like previous generation
cards would have done it will actually ramp down the voltage and down the clock
speeds to bring it into a lower thermal output in order to make sure that it
stays silent or you could say okay look no no I'm comfortable with a loud card
I'm going to move my fan curve all the way down so as soon as it hits 80° it's
already running at you know 70 80% so
that's going to give the GPU more Headroom to crank up voltages and crank
up clock speeds because you're giving it more fan to work with so this is going
to be pretty much the most customizable card on the planet when it comes to
tuning the frequency you want it to run at the voltage the GPU will run at
including setting you know voltages for it that it can crank up to that are
higher than the reliability would dictate and the Acoustics that you can
get out of it GTX Titan is actually faster and quieter than GTX 680 by a
long shot it's also the most complex largest GPU ever built bu with 7.1
billion transistors for context something like a core i7 3960x has 2.3
billion transistors and I think that pretty much
covers it oh yes Lick's uh wanting me to show a couple of things here so it uses
a PCI Express 3.0 16x interface which is
as fast as it gets these days the bottom of the card which he hasn't seen yet is
also absolutely gorgeous on the top of the card there's some more cool things
so there's an eight pin and six pin PCI Express connectors right there two SLI
fingers for three-way or four-way SLI and check this out the light on the top
actually glows just like the 690 and you can set it to either glow less or more
or even adjust the level of glowing with
the GPU load itself so you can be like oh okay I want it to only glow when I'm
playing games you can set that which I personally think is very very cool from
a modding perspective the last thing NVIDIA is added to the driver is the
ability to overclock your monitor so if you have a monitor That's rated for 60
htz uh oh say hi sayy hi you joining us
for this unboxing yeah if you have a monitor That's rated for 60 HZ sometimes
that monitor is actually capable of running at 70 80 90 htz so you might
have the most powerful single GPU graphics card on the planet and it might
be able to run your game at 120 FPS but if your monitor is only outputting 60 HZ
you're only going to see 60 of those frames per second so this has been kind
of a driver hack up till now Titan unlocks it now as with any overclocking
nothing is guaranteed so there's no no one's promising that your 60 HZ monitor
will run at 80 HZ or that your 120 HZ monitor will run at 150 HZ who knows
nobody knows no one knows not a guarantee however NVIDIA is giving you
the option in the driver now with Titan to check and see if your monitor is
capable of overclocking this may affect the longterm of your reliability for the
monitor itself and it may void your warranty for the monitor so guys
exercise caution with any overclocking Endeavor however at least now we have
the option so it is pretty much the most customizable gaming card on the planet
supports all those Kepler features such as adaptive vsync and adaptive vsync
does work in conjunction with the monitor overclocking so you might go
okay I'm I've got I've got 90 Herz on my monitor now now I can set 90 FPS and I
can use adaptive vsync so it's going to allow that car to go vsync when you're
at 90 FPS so you don't go above and get tearing and then it'll turn vsync off as
you go below it so maybe you dip down to 85 FPS
so yeah pretty much I think that's it at
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GeForce GTX Titan