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Zotac GeForce GTX Titan Black

3/21/2014 1:47:34 AM

Nvidia makes GTX Titan even faster

When the GTX 780 Ti launched, it had an advantage in games over the GTX Titan, leaving Nvidia in the odd position of having its flagship $1,330.24 card trumped by its own $831.40 model. The GTX Titan Black, which outright replaces the GTX Titan, seeks to rectify this issue by pairing a fully enabled GK110 GPU with 6GB of VRAM and full-speed double-precision performance, and some clock speed bumps too.

Zotac GeForce GTX Titan Black

As a 7.1-billion transistor GK110 part, the GTX Titan Black has five GPCs divided into 15 SMs, and this time around, all of them are enabled, as in the GTX 780 Ti. This leaves it with 2,880 stream processors and 240 texture units, a 6.7 per cent increase over the original Titan. It ships with a base clock speed of 889MHz and a 980MHz boost clock, compared to 876MHz and 928MHz in the GTX 780 Ti. Therefore, although you can buy pre-overclocked GTX 780 Ti cards with higher frequencies, it’s now the fastest card in Nvidia’s GeForce arsenal.

The GTX Titan Black also takes the 6GB frame buffer from the original GTX Titan (double the capacity of the GTX 780 Ti) and pairs it with the GTX 780 Ti’s memory speed of 1.75GHz (7GHz effective). This, along with GK110’s fat 384-bit memory bus, gives the GTX Titan Black 336GB/sec of peak memory bandwidth – 16.7 per cent more than the GTX Titan. The full-speed double-precision units also carry over from the Titan.

 

Inside design

The card has the same gorgeous design as before too, featuring a high-quality aluminium shroud. As with the GTX Titan, board partners can’t use custom coolers with the GTX Titan Black, so Zotac’s model looks the same as any other, although it includes three free Splinter Cell games, a DVI to VGA adaptor and some power adaptors. Meanwhile, all of the usual Nvidia features you’d expect are present, including G-Sync and 4-way SLI support. A vapour chamber and heatsink cool the GPU, while a metal contact plate with strategically positioned thermal pads draws heat away from the 6+2 phase power VRMs and half of the memory chips (the other half are left uncovered on the PCB’s rear). The radial fan at the side provides airflow, blasting out its hot air through the rear I/O plate.

Performance

The GTX Titan Black is the new performance king, coming top in all but the Battlefield 4 benchmark at 4K. That said, the GTX Titan Black doesn’t offer a massive benefit over the GTX 780 Ti in games. The difference between them never exceeds 2fps, which you’re unlikely to notice when playing.

This should come as little surprise, as they share identical specifications where it counts, other than the GTX Titan Black’s marginally higher clock speed. Double precision and FP64 performance is irrelevant in games, and the 6GB frame buffer does nothing for the new card in games either – even at 5,760 x 1,080 and 4K, 3GB isn’t a bottleneck. Even compared to the GTX Titan, meaningful differences are rare, although technically it does achieve borderline playable status in Battlefield 4 at 4K, unlike the GTX Titan. It outperforms the R9 290X too, in particular being noticeably smoother in the BioShock Infinite tests.

Zotac GeForce GTX Titan

 

The Unigine Valley rankings confirm what we see elsewhere. The Titan Black has less than a 2 per cent lead on the GTX 780 Ti, but is 8 and 26 per cent faster than the GTX Titan and R9 290X respectively. As expected, power consumption is a touch higher than the GTX 780 Ti and GTX Titan, although the cooler works well, never becoming too noisy at stock speeds.

We’ve seen good results when overclocking GK110 parts, and the GTX Titan Black is no exception. We managed a 25 per cent core increase, reaching a base clock of 1,119MHz, giving us a boost clock of 1,210MHz. The card sustained this frequency without issue, even peaking occasionally at 1,262MHz. We also pushed the memory to 7.4GHz (effective). When overclocked, power consumption is higher and the card becomes noisier. We saw healthy gains in each of the benchmarks though - up to 18 per cent in Battlefield 4.

Conclusion

For games, the Titan Black offers nothing over a GTX 780 Ti. Instead, it targets professional graphics users – Nvidia says only around half the original Titans sold were used for games. A cheaper, pre-overclocked and custom-cooled GTX 780 Ti will outperform the Titan Black in games too.

Specifications

·         Graphics processor Nvidia: GeForce GTX Titan Black, 889 MHz (boosting to 980 MHz)

·         Pipeline: 2,880 stream processors, 48 ROPs

·         Memory: 6GB GDDRS, 7GHz effective

·         Bandwidth: 336 GB/sec

·         Compatibility: DirectX 11.2, OpenGL 4.4

·         Outputs/ Inputs: DVI-I, DVI-D, HDMI, DisplayPort

·         Power connections: 1x6-pin, 1x8-pin, top-mounted

·         Size: 267mm long, dual-slot

 

 

 

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