NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780 Unboxing & Technology Overview
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2014-05-07
·
1,844 words · ~9 min read
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more welcome to my unboxing of the replacement for the GTX 680 this is the
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GTX 780 and you guys won't be able to get a box quite like this but the
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contents of yours will be very very
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similar the GTX 780 is the second
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graphics card to use the gk1 10 GPU this
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is the same one that's used in the GeForce GTX Titan and the same one
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that's used in the Tesla gpus that power
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the most powerful supercomputer in the world the Titan so what I find inside
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here is a special edition collectible sticker which may or may not actually
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come with your retail card and I also don't find any of the accessories that
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would normally come with a retail card either so normally you'd have some Molex
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2 PCI Express adapters and some driver discs and all that kind of stuff this
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contains absolutely nothing so don't worry too much about that because the
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part that we're interested in more than anything else is this guy right here and you
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might be noticing some other similarities to the Titan already
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because this is one sexy graphics
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card now the GTX Titan when it launched was a bit of a strange skew because it
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didn't even follow the normal numbering scheme NVIDIA basically came out and
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said this does not fit into our regular
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product stack so we're just going to call it Titan because it performs way
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better than anything else we have but it comes with a significant price premium
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the GTX 780 takes that technology and brings it down to a price point that's
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more in line with a regular GeForce card like what we're used to seeing in the
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past so you can see here I've Illustrated on the table kind of how
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this works the GTX 780 is almost as fast as a Titan has most of the same well has
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almost all the same technology and is significantly faster than something like
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a 680 about 35% faster not not only that
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but there's a couple new things that NVIDIA is rolling out so the GeForce experience which has been in beta for a
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long time now is going to be released wholesale it'll come by default
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installed by default with your latest driver download that means you'll get
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automatic driver downloads and you'll get suggested settings for popular games
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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
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some other cool features coming in GeForce experience such as Shadow play
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shadowplay uses the h264 encoder that's
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built into your GPU to automatically record up to 20 minutes of previous
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gameplay for you to cut together and make gameplay videos what's neat about
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it is that it comes with about a 5% performance hit compared to running
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something like fraps which has huge files and potentially a big performance
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hit and the files are already compressed so they're much smaller to deal with you
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don't need a huge beefy storage subsystem so it's really cool to see
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where NVIDIA is going because I know a lot of game streamers who are investing
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in dedicated hardware for game streaming when it might just be a matter of buying
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a GeForce GPU to record Rec your Let's Plays or gameplay videos or who who
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knows I'm not promising features and video is going to deliver but let's see what they do with that very cool little
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bit of tech the 780 really is intended to leave single GPU competition in the
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dust but do so quietly efficiently and
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it uses a dual slot form factor so unlike some of the non-reference cards
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that we're likely to see it won't take up unnecessary space and it'll be
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compatible with three-way or four-way SLI now all along the top of the card
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you can see the two SLI connect c s that are going to give you that compatibility
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the illuminated GeForce GTX logo that you can control in software and a six
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pin and 8 Pin PCI Express connector on the back of the card you see display
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port HDMI and two DVI ports with full support for NVIDIA surround plus an
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auxiliary display and on the bottom of the card it uses PCI Express 3.0 16x for
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the fastest connectivity on the back of the card we see some more of the Titan
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roots of this particular graphics card because it uses the same PCB design as
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the Titan see that except ah there's RAM missing so on the
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back here you can see solder points for the other 3 gigs of memory that would be
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on a Titan which has 6 gigs of RAM whereas the GTX 780 has 3 gigs of 6 GHz
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gddr5 lengthwise the GTX 780 is exactly
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the same as the Titan so there you go there's the two of them side by side how
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sexy does that look uh which makes it slightly longer than a GTX 680 so you
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can see that little difference there and slightly shorter than a Radeon 7970
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because it's got that extra little bit of plastic shroud at the end of it there
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just like the GTX Titan the car does a Marvel of industrial design oh it's so
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beautiful I mean the aluminum and the fins and the just the fact that gpus
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come with metal coolers now when you pay hundreds of dollars for a graphics card
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and it really feels like something solid and weighty and just absolutely gorgeous
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in your hand I mean that combined with the fact that the GTX logo on the top is
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illuminated and you can control that making it pulsate or you can change the
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intensity levels according to uh things like GPU power consumption so when
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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
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premium feeling product to own that goes beyond just frame rates now speaking of
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frame rates especially in SLI the GTX 780 compared to the competition from the
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red team does deliver a smoother experience I'm not going to cover it in
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full depth now but if you do a quick Google search for frame rating you'll
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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
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not all just about frames per second anymore it's about the consistency of
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the frames per second how long was each frame on the screen that determines
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whether the image appears to stutter and or whether it appears to be smooth and
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NVIDIA's drivers cooperate with the hardware that they've built into their
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cards to make the experience smoother particularly in multi-way
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configurations because of its Kepler lineage the GTX 780 is extremely power
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efficient but because it's still such a powerful graphics card it's going to
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require at least a 600 wat power supply according to NVIDIA now I know from
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personal experience you can get away with less than that but make sure you're
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using something that is a good quality lower than that power supply
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realistically anything about 450 to 500 watts if it's an extremely built power
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supply will be able to handle something like a GTX 780 it inherits some other
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really cool technology from the Titan as well most importantly GPU Boost 2.0 now
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the old GTX 680 at sort of offensive to
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call it old I guess but the GTX 680 had GPU boost which allowed the GPU to
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overclock itself in response to the fact that it wasn't consuming as much power
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as NVIDIA set for it as a power Target you could turn that power Target up a
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little bit but this also always felt like a bit of a weird relationship to me
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because the thing that kills a GPU from overclocking is heat and voltage so the
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fact that GPU boost and overclocking tool didn't respond to temperature was
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weird to me GPU Boost 2.0 is inherited from the Titan and responds to
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temperature voltage clock speed and
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power so it can do all kinds of cool stuff you can say okay uh I'm not
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comfortable with the 80° Target that NVIDIA sets by default I want my GPU to
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run at 70° it'll dynamically turn its clock speed voltage down in order to not
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go above 70° then you can say you know what I'm comfortable with a higher
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temperature I mean I'm okay with 90° and it'll turn itself up in terms of what
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the power consumption it allows and the clock speed and voltage that it allows
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making it actually run faster if you say you're okay with it being hotter and
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it's a water coolers Delight which is very very cool so you slap a water block
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on this thing tell it any temperature any power any anything is okay give it
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all the voltage go for it and the card will allow itself to be at maximum clock
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speed all the time and they've integrated something new in the software
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they're doing something called limiting factors where it'll give you a little
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indicator next to your power or your temperature or whatever else or your
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voltage that says hey you've reached the max for this one this is the one holding
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the card back from overclocking anymore so it's no longer guesswork so what is
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the GTX 780 with 234 Cuda cor a 384-bit
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bus 3 gigs of memory all the connectivity that you can pretty much
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want out of extremely high-end card and coming in at a significantly lower price
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point than the Titan it's basically the
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premium Ultra Uber high performance card that makes more sense than something
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like a Titan but is well still ultra
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high performance and Uber and overclockable and all that stuff I mean you can even overclock your display
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using the NVIDIA software thank you for checking out this unboxing and first
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look at the GTX 780 let me know in the comments if you like our new style which
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includes a little bit more glamour footage of the card and closeups and
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cool stuff like that and as always guys don't forget to subscribe to lus
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