Nvidia launch GTX Titan – powerhouse GPU

Allan 'Zardon' Campbell February 19, 2013 Featured Tech News, Graphics

This week Nvidia are releasing their latest high end graphics card targeting the wealthy enthusiast gaming audience. We can have a quick look at the hardware today, although benchmarks cannot be shared until the 21st February.

The Geforce Titan has 2,688 CUDA cores and is built around 7.1 billion transistors. Nvidia say it is the world's most powerful GPU.

Above, a showcase from Nvidia's PDF documents, showing the difference between the GTX Titan and the high end Intel Core i7 3960X Extreme Edition processor.

The card is SLI capable in 2 or 3 way configurations and has a whopping 6GB of GDDR5 memory onboard. The last time we saw a single GPU paired up with 6GB of memory was when we reviewed the Sapphire HD7970 6GB Toxic Edition back in July last year.

The Nvidia GTX Titan uses Vapor Chamber technology to keep the card cool and the ‘advanced fan control' system controls both voltage and RPM to maintain optimum fan speeds and temperatures.

Without delving into detailed performance results, Nvidia claim the card when paired up with a high end system can maintain very smooth frame rates with Crysis 3 at 5760×1080.

The company also claim that the GTX Titan is significantly quieter than the HD7970, with ‘world class acoustic' performance.

According to the company, the card will overclock very well due to the new GPU Boost system. Over Voltage is off by default, and it is up to the end user to accept the risks. If accepted, the overvoltage settings can be carried across reboots and the GPU Max Voltage can be adjusted by the user.

Nvidia want to ensure the new GTX Titan doesn't create a racket by default, so there will be the option to overclock while subsequently raising the noise levels. If you don't want to deal with additional fan noise, then leave the card at default settings.

Nvidia have incorporated display overclocking which is shown in the images above. We haven't seen this working yet, so are unable to comment.

Above an overview of the hardware, which on paper looks mighty impressive indeed. The 384 bit memory interface should ensure plenty of bandwidth at demanding settings and high image quality settings at resolutions such as 5760×1080 are well supported from the 6GB of GDDR5 memory. Nvidia rate the TDP at 250W, so we will be interested to see how much power it demands via our own testing.