NVIDIA's GeForce GTX Titan, Part 1: Titan For Gaming, Titan For Compute
by Ryan Smith on February 19, 2013 9:01 AM ESTOrigin’s Genesis: Titan on Water & More to Come
Wrapping up part 1 of our look at NVIDIA’s GeForce GTX Titan, we wanted to take a quick look at the tri-SLI system NVIDIA sampled to us for this article: Origin’s Genesis. Without the ability to publish performance data we can’t go into any detail and otherwise fully evaluate it, but what we can do is give you a sneak peek at what’s among the most unusual, and likely most powerful Titan systems on the market.
But first, as a bit of a preface, as we mentioned earlier in our article NVIDIA has been sampling reviewers with various SFF and tri-SLI systems to showcase their two boutique computer concepts. With the tri-SLI system it was not only intended to show off raw performance, but also to serve as a showcase of Titan’s build quality. You see, NVIDIA had told us that the acoustics on Titan were so good that a tri-SLI system could not only be a reasonable choice from a background noise perspective, but that it would be notably quieter than even a GTX 680 tri-SLI system, the latter being particularly hard to believe given GTX 680’s impressive acoustics and low power consumption.
Of course, things didn’t exactly go according to plan, and in a happy accident Origin went above and beyond NVIDIA’s original request. As the Genesis’ marquee feature is water-cooling, Origin went all-out in setting up our sample system for water-cooling, and not just on the CPU. Despite the fact that Titan was (and technically still is) an unreleased card, working alongside their waterblock supplier EKWaterBlocks they were able to get proper waterblocks for Titan in time to build our system. As a result our tri-SLI Genesis unexpectedly ended up being both completely water-cooled and factory overclocked.
The bad news of course is that because of the performance embargo we can’t tell you anything about the performance of the Genesis, other than to say that as fast as one Titan card is, three overclocked Titan cards running on water is even faster, sometimes by a massive margin. Furthermore, coupled with this is the fact that GPU Boost 2 was designed in part to better mesh with the superior cooling capabilities of water-cooling, taking advantage of the fact that water-cooled GPUs rarely hit their temperature limits. As a result what’s already a fast system can sustain performance that much higher thanks to the fact that we hit our top boost bins more often.
But we’re getting ahead of ourselves here…
| Origin Genesis Specifications | |
| Chassis | Corsair 800D |
| Processor |
Intel Core i7-3970X Extreme Edition, Overclocked To 4.9GHz, ORIGIN CRYOGENIC Custom Liquid Cooling CPU (6x4.9GHz, 32nm, 15MB L3, 150W) |
| Motherboard | Intel DX79SR |
| Memory | 16GB Corsair Vengeance DDR3 1866Mhz |
| Graphics | 3-WAY SLI NVIDIA GeForce GTX TITAN, ORIGIN CRYOGENIC LIQUID Cooling Solution and Professional Overclocking |
| Hard Drive(s) |
2x120 GB Corsair Neutron SSDs in RAID 0 1TB Western Digital Caviar Black SATA 6.0Gb/s, 7200RPM, 64MB Cache |
| Optical Drive(s) | 12X Blu-ray (BD) Disc Combo |
| Power Supply | 1.2 Kilowatt PSU Corsair |
| Networking | On-Board Intel |
| Audio |
Realtek ALC892 Speaker, line-in, mic, and surround jacks |
| Front Side |
Power button |
| Top Side | - |
| Operating System | Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit |
| Dimensions |
16.2" x 4.6" x 16" (412mm x 117mm x 407mm) |
| Warranty |
1 Year Part Replacement and 45 Day Free Shipping Warranty with Lifetime Labor/24-7 Support |
| Pricing | MSRP of review system: ~$7000 |
We’ll have more on Thursday, including performance data for what so far is turning out to be a ridiculously fast tri-SLI system. So until then, stay tuned.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
157 Comments
View All Comments
bigboxes - Tuesday, February 19, 2013 - link
This is Wreckage we're talking about. He's trolling. Nothing to see here. Move along.chizow - Tuesday, February 19, 2013 - link
I agree with his title, that AMD is at fault at the start of all of this, but not necessarily with the rest of his reasonings. Judging from your last paragraph, you probably agree to some degree as well.This all started with AMD's pricing of the 7970, plain and simple. $550 for a card that didn't come anywhere close to justifying the price against the last-gen GTX 580, a good card but completely underwhelming in that flagship slot.
The 7970 pricing allowed Nvidia to:
1) price their mid-range ASIC, GK104, at flagship SKU position
2) undercut AMD to boot, making them look like saints at the time and
3) delay the launch of their true flagship SKU, GK100/110 nearly a full year
4) Jack up the prices of the GK110 as an ultra-premium part.
I saw #4 occurring well over a year ago, which was my biggest concern over the whole 7970 pricing and GK104 product placement fiasco, but I had no idea Nvidia would be so usurous as to charge $1k for it. I was expecting $750-800....$1k....Nvidia can go whistle.
But yes, long story short, Nvidia's greed got us here, but AMD definitely started it all with the 7970 pricing. None of this happens if AMD prices the 7970 in-line with their previous high-end in the $380-$420 range.
TheJian - Wednesday, February 20, 2013 - link
You realize you're dogging amd for pricing when they lost 1.18B for the year correct? Seriously you guys, how are you all not understanding they don't charge ENOUGH for anything they sell? They had to lay of 30% of the workforce, because they don't make any money on your ridiculous pricing. Your idea of pricing is KILLING AMD. It wasn't enough they laid of 30%, lost their fabs, etc...You want AMD to keep losing money by pricing this crap below what they need to survive? This is the same reason they lost the cpu war. They charged less for their chips for the whole 3yrs they were beating Intel's P4/presHOT etc to death in benchmarks...NV isn't charging too much, AMD is charging too LITTLE.AMD has lost 3-4B over the last 10yrs. This means ONE thing. They are not charging you enough to stay in business.
This is not complicated. I'm not asking you guys to do calculus here or something. If I run up X bills to make product Y, and after selling Y can't pay X I need to charge more than I am now or go bankrupt.
Nvidia is greedy because they aren't going to go out of business? Without Intel's money they are making 1/2 what they did 5yrs ago. I think they should charge more, but this is NOT gouging or they'd be making some GOUGING like profits correct? I guess none of you will be happy until they are both out of business...LOL
chizow - Wednesday, February 20, 2013 - link
1st of all, AMD as a whole lost money, AMD's GPU division (formerly ATI) has consistently operated at a small level of profit. So comparing GPU pricing/profits impact on their overall business is obviously going to be lost in the sea of red ink on AMD's P&L statement.Secondly, the massive losses and devaluation of AMD has nothing to do with their GPU pricing, as stated, the GPU division has consistently turned a small profit. The problem is the fact AMD paid $6B for ATI 7 years ago. They paid way too much, most sane observers realized that 7 years ago and over the past 5-6 years it's become more obvious. The former ATI's revenue and profits did not justify the $6B price tag and as a result, AMD was *FORCED* to write down their assets as there were some obvious valuation issues related to the ATI acquisition.
Thirdly, AMD has said this very month that sales of their 7970/GHz GPUs in January 2013 alone exceeded sales of those cards in the previous *TWELVE MONTHS* prior. What does that tell you? It means their previous price points that steadily dropped from $550>500>$450 were more than the market was willing to bear given the product's price:performance relative to previous products and the competition. Only after they settled in on that $380/$420 range for the 7970/GHz edition along with a very nice game bundle did they start moving cards in large volume.
Now you do the math, if you sell 12x as many cards in 1 month at $100 profit instead of 1/12x as many cards at $250 profit over the course of 1 year, would you have made more money if you just sold the higher volume at a lower price point from the beginning? The answer is yes. This is a real business case that any Bschool grad will be familiar with when performing a cost-value-profit analysis.
CeriseCogburn - Sunday, February 24, 2013 - link
Wow, first of all, basic common sense is all it takes, not some stupid idiot class for losers who haven't a clue and can't do 6th grade math.Unfortunately, in your raging fanboy fever pitch, you got the facts WRONG.
AMD said it sold more in January than any other SINGLE MONTH of 2012 including "Holiday Season" months.
Nice try there spanky, the brain farts just keep a coming.
frankgom23 - Tuesday, February 19, 2013 - link
Who wants to pay more for lessno new features..., this is a paper launch of a useless board for the consumer, I don't even need to see official benchmarks, I'm completely dissapointed.
Maybe it's time to go back to ATI/AMD.
imaheadcase - Tuesday, February 19, 2013 - link
If you would actually READ the article you would know why.I love how people cry a river without actually knowing how the card will perform yet.
CeriseCogburn - Sunday, February 24, 2013 - link
Yes, go back, your true home is with losers and fools and crashers and bankrupt idiots who cannot pay for their own stuff.The last guy I talked to who installed a new AMD card for his awesome Eyefinity monitors gaming setup struggled for several days encompassing dozens of hours to get the damned thing stable, exclaimed several times he had finally achieved, and yet, the next day at it again, and finally took the thing, walked outside and threw it up against the brick wall "shattering it into 150 pieces" and "he's not going dumpster diving" he tells me, to try to retrieve a piece or part of it which might help him repair one of the two other DEAD upper range amd cards ( of 4 dead amd cards in the house ) he recently bought for mega gaming system.
ROFL
Yeah man, not kidding. He doesn't like nVidia by the way. He still is an amd fanboy.
He is a huge gamer with multiple systems all running all day and night - and his "main" is "down"... needless to say it was quite stressful for him and has done nothing good for the very long friendship.
LOL - Took it and in a seeing red rage and smashed that puppy to smithereens against the brick wall.
So please, head back home, lots of lonely amd gamers need support.
iMacmatician - Tuesday, February 19, 2013 - link
"For our sample card this manifests itself as GPU Boost being disabled, forcing our card to run at 837MHz (or lower) at all times. This is why NVIDIA’s official compute performance figures are 4.5 TFLOPS for FP32, but only 1.3 TFLOPS for FP64. The former assumes that boost is enabled, while the latter is calculated around GPU Boost being disabled. The actual execution rate is still 1/3."But the 837 MHz base and 876 MHz boost clocks give 2·(876 MHz)·(2688 CCs) = 4.71 SP TFLOPS and 2·(837 MHz)·(2688 CCs)·(1/3) = 1.50 DP TFLOPS. What's the reason for the discrepancies?
Ryan Smith - Tuesday, February 19, 2013 - link
Apparently in FP64 mode Titan can drop down to as low as 725MHz in TDP-constrained situations. Hence 1.3TFLOPS, since that's all NVIDIA can guarantee.