It almost feels like we have been seeing the 600 series of cards from Nvidia for a few years now. At a year and two months we are a little past due to see a new generation of cards and today we can finally take the wraps off of NVidia’s latest card, the GTX 780. Rumors have been going around for a while on this launch so let’s just jump right into it and see what it’s all about and then how it performs. One thing is for sure, this will be the start of a lot of exciting cards, and 2013 is going to be a good year!

Product Name: Nvidia GTX 780

Review Sample Provided by: Nvidia

Written by: Wes

Pictures by: Wes

GTX 680 to GTX 780

With the Titan recently being introduced, I’m sure you are all very interested to see what is inside of the GTX 780. I have put together a specification comparison of the GTX 580, GTX 680, GTX 780, and the Titan to be able to compare all of the changes. I included the GTX 580 in there because there will be a lot of people who are sporting GTX 580’s that will soon be considering upgrades, two-three years seems to be the sweet spot for a lot of enthusiast for their upgrades, this can be seen in the Steam Hardware Survey for example, the top two Nvidia cards being used currently are the 560 Ti and the 550 Ti, it wasn’t long ago that those were actually 400 series cards.

The most noticeable jumps can be seen in CUDA cores, the GTX 780 comes in surprisingly close to the Titan there and the GTX 780 pulls well ahead of the GTX 680’s 1536 CUDA cores not to mention the GTX 580’s 512. Nvidia went with 12 SMX units to hit the 2304 CUDA cores. That goes along with the Single Precision numbers: going from around 2.5 Teraflops in the GTX 680 to the GTX 780’s 4 Teraflops is very impressive. In a lot of the specifications it’s clear that Nvidia is focusing more on making the GTX 780 a powerhouse rather a relatively power friendly card like the GTX 680. We are back up to the 250W TDP’s, dropped the 6+6 power plug configuration, and most importantly we are back to a 384 bit memory configuration. To go with the increased memory bandwidth and to work well with the controller we now have 3 GB’s of frame buffer, multiple monitor gamers will especially be happy with that. The last thing to take a look at is the clock speeds across all of the cards. The GTX 780 is back to using lower clock speeds when compared to the GTX 680, hopefully this will translate to more overclocking ability.

For those who haven’t figured it out yet, the GTX 780 does feature the GK110 GPU that everyone was speculating about last year and that was in the Titan as well. It also supports the second generation of GPU Boost called Boost 2.0. This now supports overvoltaging and enables higher clock speeds when overclocking. The most noticeable thing to me with Boost 2.0 is now the overclocks will be using temperature based overclocks more where before it was mostly focused on TDP. This means there is now a slider that lets you set your temperature target and it will overclock as much as possible while keeping within your temperature range. We will see how that changes things when we get into our overclocking section.

The last change is also mostly software based but equally important. The GTX 780 uses the same cooler that the Titan used. The cooler consists of a copper vapor chamber, dual slot aluminum heatsink, and a blower style fan. To keep the noise level low they have focused a little on how people perceive noise. For example, if your fan was running at 50% all of the time you would hear it but it wouldn’t be loud but if it ran at 20% all the time and spiked up to 50% out of nowhere you would perceive it to be louder than if you heard 50% all of the time. The GTX 780’s new adaptive temperature controller tries to minimize speed variation as much as possible while keeping the card cool as well.

For those SLI fans out there, I have this picture of three GTX 780’s in SLI. Nvidia also mentioned that they are hoping to find a way to get these SLI bridges out for everyone to buy because of the feedback they have gotten from them, I know I want one, and two more GTX 780’s to go with it please!

Specifications