Inno3D GeForce GTX 780 Ti iChill DHS 3072MB Review

If you are shopping for a new high performance graphics card, then Nvidia's GTX780 Ti surely has a spot right at the top of the list. Today we look at a highly overclocked and customised model - the Inno3D GeForce GTX 780Ti iChill DHS. This card ships with one of the highest out of the box clocks and features a hefty three fan cooler. The talking point? - it ships with an Allen Key so you can take it apart. If you can afford the £600 asking price is this the card you need for the next upgrade? Make no mistake, the Inno3D GTX780 Ti Ti iChill DHS graphics card is a monster. The triple slot cooler looks stunning - almost like a futuristic weapon you would see in a Science Fiction movie. There are three 90mm fans which take centerstage and they force cool air over the thick heatpipes and heatsinks underneath. We will get a closer look at this later in the review, when we take it apart. Ref Nvidia GTX780Ti Inno3D GTX780Ti iChill DHS Ref Nvidia GTX780 Ref Nvidia GTX Titan GPU GK110 GK110 GK110 Technology 28nm 28nm 28nm Transistors 7.1Bn 7.1Bn 7.1Bn ROP’s 48 48 48 TMU’s 240 192 224 CUDA Cores 2880 2304 2688 Pixel Filrate 42.0 GPixel/s 52.1 GPixel/s 41.4 GPixel/s 40.2 GPixel/s Memory Size 3GB 3GB 6GB Texture Filrate 210.2 GTexel/s 260.5 GTexel/s 165.7 GTexel/s 187.5 GTexel/s Bus Width 384 bit 384 bit 384 bit Bandwidth 336 GB/s 288.4 GB/s 288.4 GB/s GPU clock speed 876mhz 1,085mhz 863mhz 837mhz Boost clock speed 928mhz 1,150mhz 902mhz 876mhz Memory clock speed 1,750mhz 1,820mhz 1,502mhz 1,502mhz We have reviewed many GTX780 Ti's before, however the Inno3D GTX780 Ti iChill DHS receives a staggering clock increase from 876mhz to 1,085mhz. The Boost Clock is subsequently increased from 928mhz to 1,150mhz. The 3GB of GDDR5 memory is clocked to 1,820mhz (7.28Gbps effective). 'WARNING! WARNING! you just spent £600 on a GPU, hide the credit card bill from the girlfriend!' The yellow warning strip is intended to make you believe you have 'awesome taste' for buying this card ... however we do like the artwork on the box. Don't worry there are no toxic components inside. The bundle inside is decent. The company include converter cables, literature on the product, a disc, 3DMark serial key, door hanger and mouse mat. We noticed the back of a '3M' sticker which was used - we would imagine Inno3D included a company badge to stick on the case, but clearly a previous reviewer fancied a memento. OverclockersUK are giving away a copy of Watchdogs with the Inno3D GeForce GTX 780 Ti iChill DHS. Our review sample looked to have been roughly handled by a previous reviewer so we had to spend some time cleaning the card for the pictures. The Inno3D GeForce GTX 780 Ti iChill DHS is a stunning looking graphics card - finished in a grey and black metal surround. There is a back plate in place with the words 'HerculeZ Design' highlighted in the middle. It is 300mm long. This helps to keep the PCB cool and protected. The card has allen bolts all around the cooler. These can be loosened to get access to the PCB and the three fans in the cooler (for cleaning for instance). The fans are a Dust proof design to keep dust away from the bearings. The Allen key is held inside the plastic panel at the side of the card (shown above). The card takes power from a single 8 pin and a single 6 pin PCIe connector. It is fully SLi capable, although remember these cards are three slot and may prove tricky to run in SLi depending on your motherboard and case. Connectivity is supported with two DVI ports, and a full sized DisplayPort and HDMI port. The cooler is built around two separate aluminum heatsinks - 3 of the 5 heatpipes run straight through the longer rack of aluminum fins. Two heatpipes bend backwards into the smaller heatsink area. On this page we present some high resolution images of the product. These will take much longer to open due to the dimensions, especially on slower connections. If you use these pictures on another site or publication, please credit Kitguru.net as the owner/source. You can right click and ‘save as’ to your computer to view later. Today we test with the AMD Catalyst 14.6 Beta driver and the Nvidia Forceware 337.88 driver. We are using a test rig supplied by PCSPECIALIST and built to our specifications. If you want to read more about this, or are interested in buying the same Kitguru Test Rig, check out our article with links on this page.We are featuring results today with an Apple 30 inch Cinema HD Display at 2560×1600 resolution and an Asus PQ321QE Ultra HD 4K screen running at 4K 3840 x 2160 resolution. Room ambient was held at 23c throughout testing. Comparison Graphics cards: Palit GTX780 JetStream 6GB (902 mhz core / 1502mhz memory) AMD R9 295X2 (1018mhz core / 1250mhz memory) Nvidia GTX Titan Black x2 (890 mhz core / 1,750 mhz memory) Gigabyte GTX780 Ti Windforce OC (1020mhz core / 1750 mhz memory) Palit GTX 780 Ti Jetstream OC (980 mhz core / 1,750 mhz memory) Sapphire R9 290X Vapor-X OC (1080mhz core / 1410mhz memory) Sapphire R9 290X Tri-X (1010mhz core / 1250 mhz memory) Club3D R9 290X RoyalAce Superoverclock (1050mhz / 1350mhz memory) Sapphire R9 290 Vapor-X OC (1030mhz core / 1400 mhz memory) Sapphire R9 280X Vapor-X OC (1100 mhz core / 1500 mhz memory) Software: Windows 7 Enterprise 64 bit Unigine Heaven Benchmark Unigine Valley Benchmark 3DMark Vantage 3DMark 11 3DMark Fraps Professional Steam Client FurMark Games: Thief 2014 Total War: Rome 2 Tomb Raider Metro: Last Light GRID 2 Battlefield 4 All the latest BIOS updates and drivers are used during testing. We perform generally under real world conditions, meaning KitGuru tests games across five closely matched runs and then average out the results to get an accurate median figure. If we use scripted benchmarks, they are mentioned on the relevant page. Some game descriptions edited with courtesy from Wikipedia. Futuremark released 3DMark Vantage, on April 28, 2008. It is a benchmark based upon DirectX 10, and therefore will only run under Windows Vista (Service Pack 1 is stated as a requirement) and Windows 7. This is the first edition where the feature-restricted, free of charge version could not be used any number of times. 1280×1024 resolution was used with performance settings. As we would expect based on the clock speed of the hardware, the Inno3D GeForce GTX 780 Ti iChill DHS claims the top spot in our single card benchmarks, outperforming even two of the Asus ROG Striker Platinum GTX760's in SLi! 3DMark 11 is designed for testing DirectX 11 hardware running on Windows 7 and Windows Vista the benchmark includes six all new benchmark tests that make extensive use of all the new features in DirectX 11 including tessellation, compute shaders and multi-threading. After running the tests 3DMark gives your system a score with larger numbers indicating better performance. Trusted by gamers worldwide to give accurate and unbiased results, 3DMark 11 is the best way to test DirectX 11 under game-like loads. The final score of 17,035 points places the Inno3D GeForce GTX 780 Ti iChill DHS right at the top of the single GPU chart. 3DMark is an essential tool used by millions of gamers, hundreds of hardware review sites and many of the world’s leading manufacturers to measure PC gaming performance. Futuremark say “Use it to test your PC’s limits and measure the impact of overclocking and tweaking your system. Search our massive results database and see how your PC compares or just admire the graphics and wonder why all PC games don’t look this good. To get more out of your PC, put 3DMark in your PC.” 12,859 points is our highest ever 'out of the box' score for a single GPU based graphics card. Unigine provides an interesting way to test hardware. It can be easily adapted to various projects due to its elaborated software design and flexible toolset. A lot of their customers claim that they have never seen such extremely-effective code, which is so easy to understand. Heaven Benchmark is a DirectX 11 GPU benchmark based on advanced Unigine engine from Unigine Corp. It reveals the enchanting magic of floating islands with a tiny village hidden in the cloudy skies. Interactive mode provides emerging experience of exploring the intricate world of steampunk. Efficient and well-architected framework makes Unigine highly scalable: Multiple API (DirectX 9 / DirectX 10 / DirectX 11 / OpenGL) render Cross-platform: MS Windows (XP, Vista, Windows 7) / Linux Full support of 32bit and 64bit systems Multicore CPU support Little / big endian support (ready for game consoles) Powerful C++ API Comprehensive performance profiling system Flexible XML-based data structures We use the settings shown above at 1920×1080 and 2560×1600. Stunning results, holding the top single GPU spot, behind AMD's monster R9 295X2. Valley Benchmark is a new GPU stress-testing tool from the developers of the very popular and highly acclaimed Heaven Benchmark. The forest-covered valley surrounded by vast mountains amazes with its scale from a bird’s-eye view and is extremely detailed down to every leaf and flower petal. This non-synthetic benchmark powered by the state-of-the art UNIGINE Engine showcases a comprehensive set of cutting-edge graphics technologies with a dynamic environment and fully interactive modes available to the end user. We test with the settings above both at 1920×1080 and 2560×1600. Superb results from the Inno3D GeForce GTX 780 Ti iChill DHS. In Thief 2014 Players control Garrett, a master thief, as he intends to steal from the rich. Similar to previous games in the series, players must use stealth in order to overcome challenges, while violence is left as a minimally effective last resort. We test at Ultra HD 4k with the HIGH preset, both with Direct X rendering (Nvidia and AMD) and Mantle rendering (AMD only). The Inno3D GeForce GTX 780 Ti iChill DHS delivers some killer results, averaging almost 40 frames per second at our intensive 4k settings. Tomb Raider received much acclaim from critics, who praised the graphics, the gameplay and Camilla Luddington’s performance as Lara with many critics agreeing that the game is a solid and much needed reboot of the franchise. Much criticism went to the addition of the multiplayer which many felt was unnecessary. Tomb Raider went on to sell one million copies in forty-eight hours of its release, and has sold 3.4 million copies worldwide so far. We use the ULTIMATE profile, as shown above. We want the best image quality possible. Super smooth frame rates, averaging just over 100 at our 1080p settings. Tomb Raider received much acclaim from critics, who praised the graphics, the gameplay and Camilla Luddington’s performance as Lara with many critics agreeing that the game is a solid and much needed reboot of the franchise. Much criticism went to the addition of the multiplayer which many felt was unnecessary. Tomb Raider went on to sell one million copies in forty-eight hours of its release, and has sold 3.4 million copies worldwide so far. We use the ULTIMATE profile at 2560×1600, as shown above. Tomb Raider is still perfectly playable at 1600p while maintaining maximum image quality settings. The Inno3D GeForce GTX 780 Ti iChill DHS claims the top spot in our tests, averaging 64 frames per second. Tomb Raider received much acclaim from critics, who praised the graphics, the gameplay and Camilla Luddington’s performance as Lara with many critics agreeing that the game is a solid and much needed reboot of the franchise. Much criticism went to the addition of the multiplayer which many felt was unnecessary. Tomb Raider went on to sell one million copies in forty-eight hours of its release, and has sold 3.4 million copies worldwide so far. We switched over to the ASUS Ultra HD 4K monitor and set to the ULTIMATE profile for maximum image quality. A very tough engine to power at 4k, although the Inno3D GeForce GTX 780 Ti iChill DHS manages to maintain frame rates close to 30 at all times (and never below the borderline smooth frame rate limit of 25). Metro: Last Light takes place one year after the events of Metro 2033, proceeding from the ending where Artyom chose to call down the missile strike on the Dark Ones. The Rangers have since occupied the D6 military facility, with Artyom having become an official member of the group. Khan, the nomad mystic, arrives at D6 to inform Artyom and the Rangers that a single Dark One survived the missile strike. 4A Games’ proprietary 4A Engine is capable of rendering breathtaking vistas, such as those showing the ruined remnants of Moscow, as well as immersive indoor areas that play with light and shadow, creating hauntingly beautiful scenes akin to those from modern-day photos of Pripyat’s abandoned factories and schools. We tested this particular game with the extremely demanding built in benchmark. Settings detailed above. Direct X 11 mode, Quality is set at Very High, 16 AF, normal Motion blur, Tessellation Normal, Advanced PhysX disabled and SSAA disabled. The Inno3D GeForce GTX 780 Ti iChill DHS takes top position in the single GPU tests, averaging 95 frames per second. Metro: Last Light takes place one year after the events of Metro 2033, proceeding from the ending where Artyom chose to call down the missile strike on the Dark Ones. The Rangers have since occupied the D6 military facility, with Artyom having become an official member of the group. Khan, the nomad mystic, arrives at D6 to inform Artyom and the Rangers that a single Dark One survived the missile strike. 4A Games’ proprietary 4A Engine is capable of rendering breathtaking vistas, such as those showing the ruined remnants of Moscow, as well as immersive indoor areas that play with light and shadow, creating hauntingly beautiful scenes akin to those from modern-day photos of Pripyat’s abandoned factories and schools. We tested this particular game with the extremely demanding built in benchmark. Settings detailed above. Direct X 11 mode, Quality is set at Very High, 16 AF, normal Motion blur, Tessellation Normal, Advanced PhysX disabled and SSAA disabled. The positions are held as the resolution is increased from 1080p to 1600p. Metro: Last Light takes place one year after the events of Metro 2033, proceeding from the ending where Artyom chose to call down the missile strike on the Dark Ones. The Rangers have since occupied the D6 military facility, with Artyom having become an official member of the group. Khan, the nomad mystic, arrives at D6 to inform Artyom and the Rangers that a single Dark One survived the missile strike. 4A Games’ proprietary 4A Engine is capable of rendering breathtaking vistas, such as those showing the ruined remnants of Moscow, as well as immersive indoor areas that play with light and shadow, creating hauntingly beautiful scenes akin to those from modern-day photos of Pripyat’s abandoned factories and schools. We tested this particular game with the extremely demanding built in benchmark. Settings detailed above. Direct X 11 mode, Quality is set at High, 16 AF, normal Motion blur, Tessellation Normal, Advanced PhysX disabled and SSAA disabled. A very demanding engine at 4k, and one that really needs Sli or Crossfire to run smoother at these incredibly high settings. Grid 2 is the sequel to the racing video game Race Driver: Grid. It was developed and published by Codemasters. The game includes numerous real world locations such as Paris, numerous United States locations, and many more, and also includes motor vehicles spanning four decades. In addition, it includes a new handling system that developer Codemasters has dubbed ‘TrueFeel’, which aims to hit a sweet spot between realism and accessibility. We test at the maximum image quality settings, which are different for both AMD and Nvidia cards. The Nvidia hardware is tested at 16xQCSAA and the AMD hardware is tested at 8f16x EQAA. The results below therefore are NOT directly comparable. We wanted to show performance from both AMD and NVIDIA solutions in GRID 2 when maximising the image quality settings. No problems powering this game at Ultra HD 4k with the maximum possible image quality settings. The only card however that can maintain a constant 60 frames per second at these settings is the AMD R9 295 X2. Battlefield 4 (also known as BF4) is a first-person shooter video game developed by EA Digital Illusions CE (DICE) and published by Electronic Arts. The game is a sequel to 2011′s Battlefield 3. Battlefield 4 is built on the new Frostbite 3 engine. The new Frostbite engine enables more realistic environments with higher resolution textures and particle effects. A new “networked water” system is also being introduced, allowing all players in the game to see the same wave at the same time.Tessellation has also been overhauled. We test at 2560×1600 with the image quality settings on the ‘ULTRA’ preset. We test the AMD hardware with both Direct X and AMD’s Mantle rendering. Nvidia hardware is tested with Direct X rendering. Battlefield 4 is a great looking game and it runs very well on the high end Nvidia hardware. The GTX780Ti is actually one of my favourite video cards to enjoy a game of Battlefield 4 at the weekend. Battlefield 4 (also known as BF4) is a first-person shooter video game developed by EA Digital Illusions CE (DICE) and published by Electronic Arts. The game is a sequel to 2011′s Battlefield 3. Battlefield 4 is built on the new Frostbite 3 engine. The new Frostbite engine enables more realistic environments with higher resolution textures and particle effects. A new “networked water” system is also being introduced, allowing all players in the game to see the same wave at the same time.Tessellation has also been overhauled. We test at Ultra HD 4K with the HIGH Image preset. The single Inno3D GeForce GTX 780 Ti iChill DHS manages to compete with the Asus ROG Striker Platinum GTX760 graphics cards, in an SLi configuration. The tests were performed in a controlled air conditioned room with temperatures maintained at a constant 24c – a comfortable environment for the majority of people reading this. Idle temperatures were measured after sitting at the desktop for 30 minutes. Load measurements were acquired by playing Crysis Warhead for 30 minutes and measuring the peak temperature. We also have included Furmark results, recording maximum temperatures throughout a 30 minute stress test. All fan settings were left on automatic. The cooling results speak for themselves - the best we have ever to record on a high end card, even outperforming our recent champion, the Palit GTX780 Ti Jetstream. When gaming, the card hovered between 50c and 52c - absolutely incredible. We have built a system inside a Lian Li chassis with no case fans and have used a fanless cooler on our CPU. The motherboard is also passively cooled. This gives us a build with almost completely passive cooling and it means we can measure noise of just the graphics card inside the system when we run looped 3dMark tests. We measure from a distance of around 1 meter from the closed chassis and 4 foot from the ground to mirror a real world situation. Ambient noise in the room measures close to the limits of our sound meter at 28dBa. It isn’t a real world situation to be measuring with a case panel off only a few centimeters away from a video card. Our noise figures may therefore be lower than other publications who record at closer distances, or without a fully closed case muting the noise. Why do this? Well this means we can eliminate secondary noise pollution in the test room and concentrate on only the video card. It also brings us slightly closer to industry standards, such as DIN 45635. KitGuru noise guide 10dBA - Normal Breathing/Rustling Leaves 20-25dBA – Whisper 30dBA - High Quality Computer fan 40dBA - A Bubbling Brook, or a Refrigerator 50dBA - Normal Conversation 60dBA - Laughter 70dBA – Vacuum Cleaner or Hairdryer 80dBA - City Traffic or a Garbage Disposal 90dBA - Motorcycle or Lawnmower 100dBA – MP3 player at maximum output 110dBA - Orchestra 120dBA – Front row rock concert/Jet Engine 130dBA – Threshold of Pain 140dBA – Military Jet takeoff/Gunshot (close range) 160dBA – Instant Perforation of eardrum The cooler is very active under heavy load situations and can be clearly heard. It is a little louder than most of the high end solutions we have tested recently, but considering the cooling performance which we documented on the last page, we can live with a little extra noise. It would be possible to tweak the maximum fan speeds in software so you aren't forced to live with this. To test power consumption today we are using a Keithley Integra unit and we measure power consumption from the VGA card inputs, not the system wide drain. We measure results while gaming in Crysis Warhead and the synthetic stress test Furmark and record both results. The card demands around 240 watts when gaming, perfectly acceptable considering the frame rate power it delivers. Inno3D supply their own software for overclocking, but we achieved the same results by using MSI's Afterburner, based on RivaTuner. It is more user friendly too. This card ships very heavily overclocked, running at 1,085mhz. We did manage to push it further however, to 1,158mhz before instability would occur. There was not very much additional headroom from the GDDR5 memory. The additional overclock increased the GPU score from 17,035 points to 17,792 points. The Nvidia GTX780Ti took the enthusiast sector by storm when it was released in 2013, and it has dominated the performance charts since then. We have seen a stream of excellent, high grade partner GTX 780Ti's in the last six months, with our particular favourite being the Palit GTX780 Ti JetStream OC. Today, the Palit GTX780 Ti JetStream OC has been knocked off that top position by the Inno3D GeForce GTX 780 Ti iChill DHS. The Inno3D card looks meaner than the Palit card and thanks to the modular design all the fans can be individually, and easily removed for cleaning. Some people may never touch them, but for those people who like to keep their fans running smoothly, Inno3D have implemented a useful, practical system. There is no doubt that the first impressions are positive - this is a card designed to rock with the best of them. Inno3D have put a lot of time and thought into the development of this card, and it shows. While the out of the box clock speeds are very noteworthy ... and faster than anything else we have reviewed to date - it is the remarkable cooling system that has aroused the geek in me. We have tested some fantastic cooling systems in recent months, Sapphire's Vapor-X, Tri-X and Palit's JetStream spring to mind immediately. They are outperformed however by this latest implementation of the iChill cooler. With the falling prices of Ultra HD 4K screens Nvidia's GTX780Ti is an ideal partner to drive all those pixels. If you can afford only one GTX780Ti then in a perfect world you will want to get the fastest model you can get your hands on. At 3,840 x 2,160 every single frame per second will make a difference. The Inno3D GeForce GTX 780 Ti iChill DHS would be right at the top of our shortlist for a new 4k system build, it is without question one of the most impressive high end graphics cards we have reviewed at KitGuru. Is there a negative? Well apart from the hefty £599.99 asking price - we do wish that Nvidia would double the GTX780Ti memory count to 6GB, like they did recently with the older GTX780 Non Ti version. Nvidia may know however that this could eat into GTX Titan Black sales, because even though they said the Titan Black was never designed for gamers, over 80% of their sales are actually from the gaming sector. Get the Inno3D GeForce GTX 780 Ti iChill DHS from Overclockers UK for £599.99 inc vat. It is a lot of money, but worth bearing in mind that two of these in SLi would outperform AMD's R9 295X2 which is priced around £1,100. Overclockers UK are bundling a code for Watchdogs with the Inno3D GeForce GTX 780 Ti iChill DHS, worth £30. Discuss on our Facebook page, over HERE. Pros: The fastest single GPU graphics card we have tested. Amazing cooler design. tasty bundle including a mouse mat. lowest temperatures of any GTX780ti. Cons: Not the quietest (but its acceptable). Its £600. triple slot. Kitguru says: A showcase card with performance to match. We love the design and appearance.