NVIDIA GeForce GTX Titan Unboxing & Technology Overview Linus Tech Tips
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2013-05-07
·
2,008 words · ~10 min read
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welcome to my NVIDIA GeForce GTX Titan
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unboxing this has a completely different naming scheme as you can see I have
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already actually broken the seal once but we had a bit of an error due to a uh
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an errant baby that was running around our video set so we had some
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difficulties with that but we're going to open this bad boy up and I really do
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mean bad boy this is the fastest single
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GPU card on the planet it comes packed
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in beautiful anti-static foam with a
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beautiful bubble wrap that is carefully painstakingly labeled card 4 and then
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more bubble wrap inside for your $1,000
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you get the best packaging that has ever been no I'm just kidding so this is a
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reference board provided by NVIDIA rather than being one that's made by an
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add-in board partner such as uh EVGA or
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ASUS which are going to be the ones for Titan in North
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America so you will get a proper retail package with a proper warranty and all
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of that but this one is just for benchmarking buy yours truly so the
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first thing you're probably going to notice about the Titan is that it is
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absolutely gorgeous it is styled similarly to the GeForce GTX 690 with an
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extruded aluminum casing here noise
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dampened fan just like the GP GTX 680
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and a polycarbonate window that shows you the extended fin stack that is
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actually on top of a vapor chamber
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cooler that covers the GPU itself this card has six gigs of memory now
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something that people have complained about in the past particularly with the
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GTX 690 is not enough frame buffer on
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the high-end cards so NVIDIA wanted to address this because a 690 has 4 gigs of
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memory which is two per GPU so two effective cuz you're running an SLI the
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Titan has 6 gigs so that means that these four display outputs here which
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can be run in 3+ one so three in NVIDIA
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surround and one additional one as an auxiliary display can all be powered at
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Next Generation resolution so this card is capable in a three-way SLI
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configuration of even running games like Crisis 3 at 5760 by 1080 with very high
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details on so let's flip the board over so there's some RAM on this side and to
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fit 6 gigs of memory on a board obviously you're going to have to put
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some memory on the top of it as well so I'm not going to let the baby touch the
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back of the card CU I'm sure that would be a bit of a problem so it has a
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384-bit bus this is similar to previous generation NVIDIA high-end cards such as
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the GTX 480 and what other technology we
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do we get inside so aside from all that there are some
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pretty serious improvements to the main feature that NVIDIA launched with
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GeForce GTX 680 so code named Kepler now
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this is more like Kepler on steroids because compared to around 1,500 caor
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which is what a 680 has the Titan has
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2,688 Cuda cor so in addition to just
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being a Titan and being generally Beast it introduces a new version of GPU boost
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so GPU boost was what NVIDIA was calling their automatic overclocking it was a
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dynamic change of how the card operated
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in terms of its clock speeds its volt and its voltages so according to a power
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Target so they set a power Target for how much power the board was allowed to
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draw NVIDIA went oh okay well as long as you're under that power Target we can
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ramp up the GPU clock so you'd actually get faster performance so NVIDIA started
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rating their cards for a uh a minimum
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speed as well as a sort of typical boost
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clock now the problem with that is that board power is not necess necessarily
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the only Factor there's also temperatures so board temperatures play
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an important role in the reliability of the GPU so NVIDIA went okay well let's
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do GPU Boost 2.0 GPU Boost 2.0 doesn't
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rely on the actual power that the board is drawing it relies on the temperature
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that the GPU is running at so water coolers for example would run their GTX
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680 with a water block on it so it would always be at a very low temperature but
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you'd reach that that uh that power draw
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limit it so what happened was the card would stop boosting up it would stop
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overclocking any further Titan will not
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have that issue if you keep the temperatures low Titan will overclock
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itself very significantly so the base clock for this guy is 836 MHz with a
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typical boost clock of 876 MHz however I've been told that a
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water cooled Titan without any further tweaking without any overclocking like
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manual overclocking would be expected to run anywhere from around 950 MHz to 1
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GHz having done nothing because it will dynamically see that the card is not
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reaching a temperature that's going to bother it and it'll continue to add more
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voltage and more clock speed to the card until you reach that limit now another
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thing about the maximum voltage for the card NVIDIA has completely overhauled
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the way that they handle voltage increases and overclocking you can
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actually go beyond NVIDIA's recommend
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maximum voltage for GPU reliability this has to be enabled by the addin board
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partner but it'll give you a warning an EVGA Precision or MSI afterburner any of
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those utilities that says look this will affect the long-term stability of your
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card are you sure you want to do this and if you say yeah go for it it'll let
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you push it harder and further than NVIDIA has ever really allowed their
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customers to do in the past past that
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reliability point so uh oh yes
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customizability so not only that that but GPU boost 2 actually enables some
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further customization so you can control everything from the fan profile to the
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maximum voltage to the clock speed so what that means is you can say look I'm
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comfortable with 90° I'm going to set a Target temperature of 90° and unlike a
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power based uh like a power-based Target
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it's not approximate anymore the fan will ramp up as soon as it hits that 90°
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Target or 80° which is what it ships at or even 70° this allows the card to say
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okay that's the temperature the user wants to run at so it can dynamically
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adjust the clock speed and the voltage of the card to make sure it runs at that
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temperature so what's the application of this well you could do a couple things
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you could say okay I'm comfortable with the GPU having less performance and I
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want it to run at 70° and I want it to be silent so that means what it'll do is
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it'll set your fan to spin very very very slow until you hit 70° and then at
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70° instead of ramping up the fan and compensate like previous generation
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cards would have done it will actually ramp down the voltage and down the clock
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speeds to bring it into a lower thermal output in order to make sure that it
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stays silent or you could say okay look no no I'm comfortable with a loud card
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I'm going to move my fan curve all the way down so as soon as it hits 80° it's
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already running at you know 70 80% so
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that's going to give the GPU more Headroom to crank up voltages and crank
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up clock speeds because you're giving it more fan to work with so this is going
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to be pretty much the most customizable card on the planet when it comes to
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tuning the frequency you want it to run at the voltage the GPU will run at
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including setting you know voltages for it that it can crank up to that are
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higher than the reliability would dictate and the Acoustics that you can
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get out of it GTX Titan is actually faster and quieter than GTX 680 by a
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long shot it's also the most complex largest GPU ever built bu with 7.1
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billion transistors for context something like a core i7 3960x has 2.3
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billion transistors and I think that pretty much
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covers it oh yes Lick's uh wanting me to show a couple of things here so it uses
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a PCI Express 3.0 16x interface which is
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as fast as it gets these days the bottom of the card which he hasn't seen yet is
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also absolutely gorgeous on the top of the card there's some more cool things
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so there's an eight pin and six pin PCI Express connectors right there two SLI
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fingers for three-way or four-way SLI and check this out the light on the top
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actually glows just like the 690 and you can set it to either glow less or more
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or even adjust the level of glowing with
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the GPU load itself so you can be like oh okay I want it to only glow when I'm
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playing games you can set that which I personally think is very very cool from
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a modding perspective the last thing NVIDIA is added to the driver is the
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ability to overclock your monitor so if you have a monitor That's rated for 60
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htz uh oh say hi sayy hi you joining us
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for this unboxing yeah if you have a monitor That's rated for 60 HZ sometimes
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that monitor is actually capable of running at 70 80 90 htz so you might
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have the most powerful single GPU graphics card on the planet and it might
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be able to run your game at 120 FPS but if your monitor is only outputting 60 HZ
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you're only going to see 60 of those frames per second so this has been kind
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of a driver hack up till now Titan unlocks it now as with any overclocking
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nothing is guaranteed so there's no no one's promising that your 60 HZ monitor
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will run at 80 HZ or that your 120 HZ monitor will run at 150 HZ who knows
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nobody knows no one knows not a guarantee however NVIDIA is giving you
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the option in the driver now with Titan to check and see if your monitor is
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capable of overclocking this may affect the longterm of your reliability for the
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monitor itself and it may void your warranty for the monitor so guys
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exercise caution with any overclocking Endeavor however at least now we have
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the option so it is pretty much the most customizable gaming card on the planet
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supports all those Kepler features such as adaptive vsync and adaptive vsync
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does work in conjunction with the monitor overclocking so you might go
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okay I'm I've got I've got 90 Herz on my monitor now now I can set 90 FPS and I
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can use adaptive vsync so it's going to allow that car to go vsync when you're
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at 90 FPS so you don't go above and get tearing and then it'll turn vsync off as
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you go below it so maybe you dip down to 85 FPS
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so yeah pretty much I think that's it at
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this point don't forget to subscribe to lus Tech tips for more unboxings reviews
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and other computer videos and of course check out all of my videos about the
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GeForce GTX Titan