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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fewafwwaefwa - Thursday, November 7, 2013 - link
sterven..althaz - Thursday, November 7, 2013 - link
G-Sync a game-changer, seriously? I admit to not having seen it in action, but it seems like a small advantage at best and something nobody in the whole world has a monitor that supports it at worst.MonkeyM - Sunday, November 10, 2013 - link
780 isn't nearly as overprice as the ti. It's 500 now, not 650. Which, in all honesty, is a pretty fair price for a card that draw almost 70 watts less than the 290 or 290x. Badly overpriced? False. Overpriced? That's more than fair for the Ti, but a bit of a stretch for the 780. Meagre gain is also bullshit. You get the last 3 missing SMX's, an extra 1,000Mhz on the GDDR5's clock, and you also get a sizable 576 more stream processors. Other than those, it's a fair comment. I do wish they would feel the need to drop prices more, but you certainly get consistency when you buy from big green...Da W - Thursday, November 7, 2013 - link
Hey look, an Nvidia Fanboy! So happy to get a few framerate advantage like if he owned the company or worked for it.WHO GIVES A DAMN?
At the end of the day i'm looking at performance/price/temperature/noise. That being said, living in Canada, every degree of heat my videocard produce, i save in heating bill.
euskalzabe - Thursday, November 7, 2013 - link
hahahaha... I totally understand, that is one of the reasons I still keep my GTX470: the heat it provides during cold Chicago winters is a plus until I move elsewhere next year and buy a 8xx Maxwell :)EzioAs - Thursday, November 7, 2013 - link
The GTX 780ti is also quite power hungry and loud and you would know that if you read the reviewWreckage - Thursday, November 7, 2013 - link
I'm guessing you ignored the "uber mode" setting for the 290x, it is off the charts compared to the 780ti.Nothing I said in my above post is wrong. I think it's the truth that is upsetting people.
EzioAs - Thursday, November 7, 2013 - link
You also didn't clarify that it was the Uber mode...and it is still one the charts.Without the "uber mode", the 290X is still quite close to the GTX 780ti in terms of gaming performance, power consumption and noise.
TheJian - Thursday, November 7, 2013 - link
You must not be reading anywhere but here, and even then, 290x isn't close:Oddly Anandtech doesn’t seem to know it has special tech in it that allows better OCing – power balancing (unbalancing?). You guys not using it or something? :)
http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/graphics/2013/11/...
“A new power management feature for the GTX 780 Ti related to clock speeds and overclocking in particular is called Power Balancing. A card like the GTX 780 Ti draws power across three rails: the PCI-Express lane and the two additional PCI-E power connections. Power is balanced between the three but can become unbalanced when overclocking and possibly limit your overclocks if you max out one rail while having headroom elsewhere. Power Balancing simply allows the balance to be maintained when overclocking, potentially allowing for higher overclocks than previous GK110 cards, on top of the already higher clock speeds.”
They only hit 1152, but in practice saw it hitting 1230. Mem hit 1950!
http://www.guru3d.com/articles_pages/geforce_gtx_7...
More on power balancing. They hit 1276 boost 7948mem.
http://www.legitreviews.com/nvidia-geforce-gtx-780...
1289 OC/1900 mem
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m1JOhT015ww
Linustechtips, as always both cards Oc’ed to the wall. He mentions Over 1200 core (not sure if that’s base or boost). But as you can see when both 780ti/290x are clocked to max 780ti dominates everything. Benchmarks at 8:35 or so. Also note Luke says 1080p will still be tough in upcoming games like star citizen etc as he shows. Pretty much a landslide by 15-25% “crushing everything” Luke says. He actually discusses 1080p and shows Farcry 3 (55avg, 290x hits 47avg)/Crysis 3 (50fps vs. 40fps 290x) maxed not hitting above 55fps and at 2560 shows they don’t even hit 30fps avg and this is OC’ed to the max and already kicking the crap out of AMD here (24fps crysis3 for 290x max oc’ed). So if you like to MAX everything in your game, these both are not even playable in crysis 3 or farcry3 at 2560 and many other games. You will constantly be turning stuff down at 1600p, so not quite sure how anyone can say these cards are overkill for 1080p when as he notes games like star citizen will no doubt slow you down even more than Crysis 3 (same engine, later game, well duh). You’ll need 20nm to max 2560 or always run things on low, medium etc like anandtech does. You can play there but with how many sacrifices?
http://www.overclockersclub.com/reviews/nvidia_gtx...
1304 OC/1940 mem
Note also these guys show the quiet mode dropped 290x to 669mhz!
While Anandtech still uses very few games and a useless warhead game:
Games 780 wins or dominates in 2560 ALL vs. UBER 290x (of course all worse for quiet mode, note bit-tech only does 1080p and 5760):
Skyrim (bit-tech w/hires texture packs, techpowerup without)
Assassins Creed 3 (techpowerup, 5.3%)
SplinterCell Blacklist (techpowerup, blows away 690, crushes UBER 36%, also same shown at overclockersclub even 5760)
Battlefield 3 (techpowerup, legitreviews, overclockersclub 1080/5760)
Battlefield 4 (bit-tech, but barely, same 1080p, tweaktown shows big loss? But guru3d shows big win@2xMSAA…LOL – guru3d shows losses below)
Batman Arkham City (overclockersclub at both 1080/5760)
Tombraider (legitreviews, techpowerup, tweaktown etc)
WOW Mysts of Pandaria (techpowerup, over 25% faster, over 20% 5760)
StarCraft 2 HOS (techpowerup, over 15%, beat 690 too)
Diablo 3 (techpowerup, over 15%, 20% in 1080p also)
COD Black Ops 2 (techpowerup 17%, again over 22% in 1080p also)
Sleeping Dogs (techpowerup)
Crysis 3 (techpowerup, bit-tech)
Bioshock Infinite (Techpowerup, bit-tech etc – everyone I guess)
Phantasy Star online 2 (tweaktown, 17%+, even beats 1065mhz OC 290x)
Lost Planet 2 (tweaktown, over 34%! Same vs. 1065mhz 290x, same 1080p)
F1 2012 (tweaktown, beats 1065mhz 290x also, all resolutions)
Dirt Showdown (tweaktown tie 2560, but wins 1200p/1680x1050)
Far Cry2 (tweaktown, anyone play this? Still they show it over 10% NV)
Guild Wars 2 (techreport, dominated by old 780, so 780ti will be better)
Medal of Honor Warfighter (guru3d 17%).
Maybe there's a reason anandtech has chosen their games? Still waiting for the NVIDIA PORTAL.
The point here? Gsync, GeforceExp, Physx, Cuda, streaming, shadowplay, lower noise, power, heat, 3 AAA games, massive OCing and all the games above with some major victories (BEFORE and overclock). This is without mentioning all the driver issues, including AMD admitting they have a current problem with “VARIANCE” with 290/290x and will fix that with a driver supposedly in response to Tomshardware article, Techreport etc about retails perf being lower than press cards. For anyone thinking $700 is a rip-off, I suggest you look at the numbers/features above. On top you need a new fan or wait for better models before I'd even touch 290x/290 due to noise.
Only disappointment I can see as a buyer, is no full DP. Titan still has that and 6GB, though nobody can show a game using more than 3GB and run into the problem while being OVER 30fps. To force this into a problem (not sure you can, skyrim modded out?), you will be CRAWLING in fps.
Galidou - Thursday, November 7, 2013 - link
Wow dude, hardcore fan or working for nvidia or I don't know, took the time to find every link, type that to make us realise this: nvidia's reference cooler is amazing like before, we know how GTX 780 ti pushed to the max performs(i don't think custom coolers will go much past 1300mhz on the core), 290x reference cooler is crap(like we didn't already know) and for that we still don't know how it performs pushed to the max.Oh and maybe YOU didn't chose your games for comparison... And yes it is close, from your carefully handpicked games it's averaging 15-20% faster while costing 28% more.
700$ is not a ripoff for totl performance but still too much for 99.8% of us(pc gamers that still use 1080p monitors).
For the 3gb argument, did you travel in the future, 2 years from now if the games will never use more? Skyrim with a couple mods goes close to 2gb in 1080p!! Heavily modded over 2gb easily.i'm right now on the limit of mods with my GTX 660 ti 2gb, sometimes it suffers from a little lack of memory...