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.
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hammer256 - Tuesday, February 19, 2013 - link
Ryan's analysis of the target market for this card is spot on: this card is for small scale HPC type workloads, where the researcher just want to build a desktop-like machine with a few of those cards. I know that's what I use for my research. To me, this is the real replacement of the GTX 580 for our purposes. The price hike is not great, but when put to context of the K20X, it's a bargain. I'm lusting to get 8 of these cards and get a Tyan GPU server.Gadgety - Tuesday, February 19, 2013 - link
While gamers see little benefit, it looks like this is the card for GPU rendering, provided the software developers at VRay, Octane and others find a way to tap into this. So one of these can replace the 3xGTX580 3GBs.chizow - Tuesday, February 19, 2013 - link
Nvidia has completely lost their minds. Throwing in a minor bone with the non-neutered DP performance does not give them license to charge $1K for this part, especially when DP on previous flagship parts carried similar performance relative to Tesla.First the $500 for a mid-range ASIC in GTX 680, then $1200 GTX 690 and now a $1000 GeForce Titan. Unbelievable. Best of luck Nvidia, good luck competing with the next-gen consoles at these price points, or even with yourselves next generation.
While AMD is still at fault in all of this for their ridiculous launch pricing for the 7970, these recent price missteps from Nvidia make that seem like a distant memory.
ronin22 - Wednesday, February 20, 2013 - link
Bullshit of a typical NV hater.The compute-side of the card isn't a minor bone, it's its prime feature, along with the single-chip GTX690-like performance.
"especially when DP on previous flagship parts carried similar performance relative to Tesla"
Bullshit again.
Give me a single card that is anywhere near the K20 in DP performance and we'll talk.
You don't understand the philosophy of this card, as many around here.
Thanksfully, the real intended audience is already recognizing the awesomeness of this card (read previous comments).
You can go back to playing BF3 on your 79xx, but please close the door behind you on your way out ;)
chizow - Wednesday, February 20, 2013 - link
Heh, your ignorant comments couldn't be further from the truth about being an "NV hater". I haven't bought an ATI/AMD card since the 9700pro (my gf made the mistake of buying a 5850 though, despite my input) and previously, I solely purchased *multiple* Nvidia cards in this flagship market for the last 3 generations.I have a vested interest in Nvidia in this respect as I enjoy their products, so I've never rooted for them to fail, until now. It's obvious to me now that between AMD's lackluster offerings and ridiculous launch prices along with Nvidia's greed with their last two high-end product launches (690 and Titan), that they've completely lost touch with their core customer base.
Also, before you comment ignorantly again, please look up the DP performance of GTX 280 and GTX 480/580 relative to their Tesla counterparts. You will see they are still respectable, ~1/8th of SP performance, which was still excellent compared to the completely neutered 1/32 DP of GK104 Kepler. That's why there is still a high demand for flagship Fermi parts and even GT200 despite their overall reputation as a less desirable part due to their thermal characteristics.
Lastly, I won't be playing BF3 on a 7970, try a pair of GTX 670s in SLI. There's a difference between supporting a company through sound purchasing decisions and stupidly pissing away $1K for something that cost $500-$650 in the past.
The philosophy of this card is simple: Rob stupid people of their money. I've seen enough of this in the past from the same target audience and generally that feeling of "awesomeness" is quickly replaced by buyer's remorse as they realize that slightly higher FPS number in the upper left of their screen isn't worth the massive number on their credit card statement.
CeriseCogburn - Sunday, February 24, 2013 - link
That one's been pissing acid since the 680 launch, failed and fails to recognize the superior leap of the GTX580 over the prior gen, which gave him his mental handicap believing he can get something for nothing, along with sucking down the master amd fanboy Charlie D's rumor about the "$350" flagship nVidia card blah blah blah 680 blah blah second tier blah blah blah.So instead the rager now claims he wasted near a grand on two 670's - R O F L - the lunatics never end here man.
bamboo69 - Tuesday, February 19, 2013 - link
Origin is using EK Waterblocks? i hope they arentt nickel plated, their nickel blocks flakeKnock24 - Wednesday, February 20, 2013 - link
I've seen it mentioned in the article that Titan has HyperQ support, but I've also read the opposite elsewhere.Can anyone confirm that HyperQ is supported? I'm guessing the simpleHyperQ Cuda SDK example might reveal if it's supported or not.
torchedguitar - Wednesday, February 20, 2013 - link
HyperQ actually means two separate things... One part is the ability to have a process act as a server, providing access to the GPU for other MPI processes. This is supported on Linux using Tesla cards (e.g. K20X) only, so it won't work on GTX Titan (it does work on Titan the supercomputer, though). The other part of HyperQ is that there are multiple hardware queues available for managing the work on multiple CUDA streams. GTX Titan DOES support this part, although I'm not sure just how many of these will be enabled (it's a tradeoff, having more hardware streams allows more flexibility in launching concurrent kernels, but also takes more memory and takes more time to initialize). The simpleHyperQ sample is a variation of the concurrentKernels sample (just look at the code), and it shows how having more hardware channels cuts down on false dependencies between kernels in different streams. You put things in different stream because they have no dependencies on each other, so in theory nothing in stream X should ever get stuck waiting for something in stream Y. When that does happen due to hitting limits of the hardware, it's a false dependency. An example would be when you try to time a kernel launch by wrapping it with CUDA event records (this is the simpleHyperQ sample). GPUs before GK110 only have one hardware stream, and if you take a program that launches kernels concurrently in separate streams, and wrap all the kernels with CUDA event records, you'll see that suddenly the kernels run one-at-a-time instead of all together. This is because in order to do the timing for the event, the single hardware channel queues up the other launches while waiting for each kernel to finish, then it records the end time in the event, then goes on to the next kernel. With HyperQ's addition of more hardware streams, you get around this problem. Run the simpleHyperQ sample on a 580 or a 680 through a tool like Nsight and look at the timeline... You'll see all the work in the streams show up like stair steps -- even though they're in different streams, they happen one at a time. Now run it on a GTX Titan or a K20 and you'll see many of the kernels are able to completely overlap. If 8 hardware streams are enabled, the app will finish 8x faster, or if 32 are enabled, 32x faster.Now, this sample is extremely contrived, just to illustrate the feature. In reality, overlapping kernels won't buy you much speedup if you're already launching big enough kernels to use the GPU effectively. In that case, there shouldn't much room left for overlapping kernels, except when you have unbalanced workloads where many threads in a kernel finish quickly but a few stragglers run way longer. With HyperQ, you greatly increase your chances that kernels in other streams can immediately start using the resources freed up when some of the threads in a kernel finish early, instead of waiting for all threads in the kernel to finish before starting the next kernel.
vacaloca - Monday, March 4, 2013 - link
I wanted to say that you hit the nail on the head... I just tested the simpleHyperQ example, and indeed, the Titan has 8 hardware streams enabled. For every multiple higher than 8, and the "Measured time for sample" goes up.