Fastest single-GPU card? Yep. Fastest
GPU? Nope
If aliens ever land and say, "Take us
to your single-GPU leader," you'll have to find a GTX Titan that's
available for a viewing. The Titan is without a doubt the fastest single-GPU
card available today, but it's not the fastest single video card, as that
distinction still belongs to dual-GPU behemoths such as the Asus Ares II and
the Nvidia GTX 690. A lot of people don't enjoy messing with SLI and
Cross-FireX, though, and for them the Titan offers the highest level of
performance possible at this time without any dual card shenanigans. It also
brings some new technology to the table, has a smaller form factor and lower
TDP than the GTX 690, and includes heavily revamped tuning software designed
for quiet operation, making it one of the most well-rounded and impressive GPU
packages we’ve encountered in recent memory.
EVGA
GeForce GTX Titan
The Titan has existed for more than a year
in the supercomputer world in the form of the Tesla K20X, which costs around
$5,000. It’s Nvidia's Big Kepler GPU, meaning it's the most powerful
implementation of the company’s current architecture, and for context it's
almost double everything compared to a GTX 680 GPU. It has twice the
transistors, almost double the CUDA cores, triple the frame buffer, a wider
memory bus, better double-precision performance for compute, and totally
revamped tuning software. Given its massive parallelism and size, the card runs
at a much slower clock speed than a GTX 680, however, moving along at 836MHz
compared to the 680’s 1,006MHz clock speed. It’s a half-inch longer than the
GTX 680, but is a worthy successor to the flagship cards we tested last year,
as it offers a sizable performance increase over all of them dual-GPU cards
excluded, of course.
In terms of new technology, its tuning
software now lets you dictate a maximum temperature for the card, which helps
keep it totally silent at all times. Out of the box it’s set to 80 C but you
can nudge it up to 95 C if you’re feeling saucy; the card can handle it. You
can also over volt the Titan, which is a first for a "stock” card from
Nvidia. The GeForce GTX logo is now controlled by software, too, so you can
make it breathe and tweak its brightness level. It will supposedly also let you
"overclock” your display’s refresh rate, allowing you to bypass VSync to
achieve higher frame rates.
In
terms of new technology, its tuning software now lets you dictate a maximum
temperature for the card, which helps keep it totally silent at all times
In testing, we saw the Titan reign supreme
over its single-GPU competitors, but it could not topple the Ares II, Radeon
7990 Devil 13, or GTX 690 cards. It’s also not as fast as dual-card SLI and
CrossFireX configurations, which isn't surprising, but the Titan is close to
them despite using only one GPU, which is quite impressive. It also requires
exactly half the power requirements, needing just one 6-pin and one 8-pin PCIe
connector. Overall, it’s a good 10-15 percent faster than the GTX 680, which is
great and all, but not for double the price.
In the end, the main goal of the Titan is
twofold: to provide a kick-ass GPU to fit inside the increasingly popular SFF
rigs, and to convincingly take the single-GPU crown back from AMD’s HD 7970 GHz
edition. On both of these fronts It's definitely Mission Accomplished, which
can mean only one thing: It’s your move, AMD!
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EVGA GeForce
GTX Titan specs
Pros
·
Fastest single-GPU available;
·
Surprisingly quiet
·
Superb software
·
Smallish form-factor
Cons
·
SLI/ CrossFirex is still faster
·
Not as fast as same-price GTX 690
·
Super expensive
·
Price: $1,000
·
Website: www.evqa.com
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