First GeForce GTX Titan Z preview: fast, but not fast enough

A Hong Kong-based magazine has tested the highly-anticipated Nvidia GeForce GTX Titan Z graphics card ahead of other media outlets. The review was done on currently available drivers, not the final drivers for the dual-chip graphics card. Even with pre-release software the new flagship solution from Nvidia Corp. delivers remarkable performance. Still, it is not high enough to justify its price-tag.

The E-Zone magazine managed to get an Nvidia GeForce GTX Titan Z 12GB graphics card that is not sold officially and test it in multiple popular benchmarks. The publication used a PC system powered by a six-core Intel Core i7-3960X microprocessor, 16GB of DDR3 memory and Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit OS. The media outlet used AMD Catalyst 14.4 beta and Nvidia 337.69 beta drivers. All tests except 3DMark were run in 2560*1440 resolution.

The results obtained are as follows:

The article from the E-Zone magazine was scanned by a forum member of LinusTechTips. Thanks to TechPowerUp for the tip.

It is evident that the GeForce GTX Titan Z powered by two GK110 graphics processing units performs extremely well compared to any single-chip graphics solution. However, it is always behind a pair of GeForce GTX 780 Ti boards in 2-way SLI mode (probably, in 4K resolution the situation may change and the Titan Z will be faster due to larger memory banks [6GB of GDDR5 per GPU]). When compared to its main rival – the AMD Radeon R9 295X2 – the Titan Z is sometimes faster, sometimes equal and sometimes slower, which is exactly the reason why Nvidia had to delay its launch until the new drivers are ready. A $3000 graphics card should always be faster than a $1500 graphics board.

The specialists from Hong Kong also found out that the GeForce GTX Titan Z has lower power consumption compared to the Radeon R9 295X2. However, since the latter uses hybrid liquid cooling solution, it runs cooler than the Titan Z. Moreover, Nvidia’s dual-chip graphics board is rather loud when under load.

The magazine concluded that at present the GeForce GTX Titan Z is hardly worth buying for $3000 because there is an alternative from AMD which costs $1500 and there are GeForce GTX 780 Ti as well as GeForce GTX Titan Black graphics cards that can be paired in SLI mode and deliver ever greater performance.

It should be noted that the GeForce GTX Titan Z has not been released officially yet, there are no final drivers for it, and so its actual performance is still to be discovered.

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KitGuru Says: Performance results of the GeForce GTX Titan Z are perfectly logical and could have been predicted. At present Nvidia is polishing off its drivers with one and only purpose: to make the GeForce GTX Titan Z faster than the Radeon R9 295X2. But keep in mind, all the multi-GPU optimizations it will implement will also boost performance of 2-way SLI configurations featuring GeForce GTX 780 Ti or GeForce GTX Titan Black, which will always leave the Titan Z behind thanks to higher clock-rates. In short, there will always be something better than the Titan Z and at lower cost.

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