The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780 Ti Review
by Ryan Smith on November 7, 2013 9:01 AM ESTMeet The GeForce GTX 780 Ti
When it comes to the physical design and functionality of the GTX 780 Ti, to no surprise NVIDIA is sticking with what works. The design of the GTX Titan and its associated cooler have proven themselves twice over now between the GTX Titan and the GTX 780, so with only the slightest of changes this is what NVIDIA is going with for GTX 780 Ti, too. Consequently there’s very little new material to cover here, but we’ll quickly hit the high points before recapping the general design of what has now become the GTX 780 series.
The biggest change here is that GTX 780 Ti is the first NVIDIA launch product to feature the new B1 revision of their GK110 GPU. B1 has already been shipping for a couple of months now, so GTX 780 Ti isn’t the first card to get this new GPU. However while GTX Titan and GTX 780 products currently contain a mix of the old and new revisions as NVIDIA completes the change-over, GTX 780 Ti will be B1 (and only B1) right out the door.
As for what’s new for B1, NVIDIA is telling us that it’s a fairly tame revision of GK110. NVIDIA hasn’t made any significant changes to the GPU, rather they’ve merely gone in and fixed some errata that were in the earlier revision of GK110, and in the meantime tightened up the design and leakage just a bit to nudge power usage down, the latter of which is helpful for countering the greater power draw from lighting up the 15th and final SMX. Otherwise B1 doesn’t have any feature changes nor significant changes in its power characteristics relative to the previous revision, so it should be a fairly small footnote compared to GTX 780.
The other notable change coming with GTX 780 Ti is that NVIDIA has slightly adjusted the default temperature throttle point, increasing it from 80C to 83C. The difference in cooling efficiency itself will be trivial, but since NVIDIA is using the exact same fan curve on the GTX 780 Ti as they did the GTX 780, the higher temperature throttle effectively increases the card’s equilibrium point, and therefore the average fan speed under load. Or put another way, but letting it get a bit warmer the GTX 780 Ti will ramp up its fan a bit more and throttle a bit less, which should help offset the card’s increased power consumption while also keeping thermal throttling minimized.
| GeForce GTX 780 Series Temperature Targets | ||||
| GTX 780 Ti Temp Target | GTX 780 Temp Target | GTX Titan Temp Target | ||
| 83C | 80C | 80C | ||
Moving on, since the design of the GTX 780 Ti is a near carbon copy of GTX 780, we’re essentially looking at GTX 780 with better specs and new trimmings. NVIDIA’s very effective (and still quite unique) metallic GTX Titan cooler is back, this time featuring black lettering and a black tinted window. As such GTX 780 Ti remains a 10.5” long card composed of a cast aluminum housing, a nickel-tipped heatsink, an aluminum baseplate, and a vapor chamber providing heat transfer between the GPU and the heatsink. The end result is the GTX 780 Ti is a quiet card despite the fact that it’s a 250W blower design, while still maintaining the solid feel and eye-catching design that NVIDIA has opted for with this generation of cards.
Drilling down, the PCB is also a re-use from GTX 780. It’s the same GK110 GPU mounted on the same PCB with the same 6+2 phase power design. This being despite the fact that GTX 780 Ti features faster 7GHz memory, indicating that NVIDIA was able to hit their higher memory speed targets without making any obvious changes to the PCB or memory trace layouts. Meanwhile the reuse of the power delivery subsystem is a reflection of the fact that GTX 780 Ti has the same 250W TDP limit as GTX 780 and GTX Titan, though unlike those two cards GTX 780 Ti will have the least headroom to spare and will come the closest to hitting it, due to the general uptick in power requirements from having 15 active SMXes. Finally, using the same PCB also means that GTX 780 has the same 6pin + 8pin power requirement and the same display I/O configuration of 2x DL-DVI, 1x HDMI, 1x DisplayPort 1.2.
On a final note, for custom cards NVIDIA won’t be allowing custom cards right off the bat – everything today will be a reference card – but with NVIDIA’s partners having already put together their custom GK110 designs for GTX 780, custom designs for GTX 780 Ti will come very quickly. Consequently, expect most (if not all of them) to be variants of their existing custom GTX 780 designs.
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Ryan Smith - Thursday, November 7, 2013 - link
Very limited time. 290 launched on Tuesday, 780 Ti launched on Thursday. If I had a couple more days I would have used the time to collect data from some older cards.undeadpolice - Thursday, November 7, 2013 - link
Thanks Anantech, I was worry that I make the wrong choice by buying two weaker R9 290x as money is not issue for but performance is, with all the Gtx780ti hypeAt least I was preparing for a regret it but it turns to be a present surprise!
GeorgeH - Thursday, November 7, 2013 - link
What does the asterisk next to the 280X benchmarks signify?Ryan Smith - Thursday, November 7, 2013 - link
Non-reference. We don't have a reference 280X, and for 280X CF it's an oddball combination of an XFX card and an underclocked Asus card.ludikraut - Thursday, November 7, 2013 - link
Ryan, how are you coming up with "This [780ti performance advantage] will break down to being 11% faster than Radeon R9 290X, 9% faster than GTX Titan, and a full 20% faster than the original GTX 780 that it formally replaces"? I looked through the test results again, and if I focus on the 4K results, what really strikes me is how close the R9 290 stays on the heels of the 780ti (often within 1-2 FPS). Heck in some cases the $400 R9 290 is ahead of the $700 780ti. Also, why no results for dual/triple monitor setups?l8r)
Yojimbo - Thursday, November 7, 2013 - link
Well that's good. Buy a $400 card, $800 on monitors or whatever, and run everything at a high resolution and extremely low quality settings. Either that or suffer through 30 fps average frame rates and minimum frame rates of god knows.Ryan Smith - Thursday, November 7, 2013 - link
Our focus is on 2560x1440, and that's where we draw our primary conclusions from. As we've mentioned in the past few weeks in other reviews (290X, etc), we don't consider 4K to be viable for a single card setup right now. You have to make some very significant quality compromises in most cases, which are far more detrimental than the extra resolution is beneficial. 4K gaming really requires a multi-GPU setup right now, which is why we focus on 4K when discussing said multi-GPU setups.As for multi-monitor setups, the use of a 4K tiled monitor generally makes those redundant. It tests the same technology, and does so at an even higher resolution than 3x1080p. Since we don't have the time to do 2560 and 4K and multi-monitor, we've opted for the first two on the basis listed above.
NewCardNeeded - Thursday, November 7, 2013 - link
Wow, after reading this review it's become clear what graphics card I'm now going to buy.An R9 290 with 3rd party cooler :-)
Da W - Thursday, November 7, 2013 - link
In the sake of fareness, ill add an unbiased review. Since AMD cards scale better than Nvidia at 4K, and that "uber" mode is noisy but still is the mode where the card really runs at full speed (NOT overclocked), i think its grossly unfair to only cite 1400p gaming, taking only 290X non-"uber" numbers and call Nvidia a winner.So for 4 k gaming, where a tie means 1or2 FPS difference or that the 780ti sits between the 290X uber and non-uber mode, we see:
-Metro: tie
-CoH2: AMD
-Bioshock: Nvidia
-Battlefield 3: tie (battle field 4 will be a win for AMD but we don't have that here)
-Crysis 3: Nvidia
-Crysis: Tie
-TW Rome2: Nvidia
-Hitman: AMD
-Grid 2: Tie
That's 2 AMD wins, 3 Nvidia wins and 4 ties at 4K, which is also a good proxy for eyefinity/surround setups.
AMD is louder and Nvidia is 200$ more. You essentially pay 200$ for a cooler.
Case closed.
Kutark - Friday, November 8, 2013 - link
nobody cares about 4k. I honestly don't even know why people bother to benchmark. Like the author said, 4k is only viable in multi (high end) GPU setups. So we're talking 800+ dollars just for video cards, the only 4k monitor out right now is $3800, has a 30hz refresh rate and fucking terrible input lag. NOBODY IS GAMING AT 4K. If we were having this discussion a year from now things might be a *little* different. But we're not, we're having it now. So, i state once again, nobody except AMD fanbois trying to stroke their proverbial cocks gives 2 shits about how these cards scale at 4k resolution.