The NVIDIA GeForce GTX Titan X Review
by Ryan Smith on March 17, 2015 3:00 PM ESTOverclocking
Finally, no review of a GTX Titan card would be complete without a look at overclocking performance.
From a design standpoint, GTX Titan X already ships close to its power limits. NVIDIA’s 250W TDP can only be raised another 10% – to 275W – meaning that in TDP limited scenarios there’s not much headroom to play with. On the other hand with the stock voltage being so low, in clockspeed limited scenarios there’s a lot of room for pushing the performance envelope through overvolting. And neither of these options addresses the most potent aspect of overclocking, which is pushing the entirely clockspeed curve higher at the same voltages by increasing the clockspeed offsets.
GTX 980 ended up being a very capable overclocker, and as we’ll see it’s much the same story for the GTX Titan X.
| GeForce GTX Titan X Overclocking | ||||
| Stock | Overclocked | |||
| Core Clock | 1002MHz | 1202MHz | ||
| Boost Clock | 1076Mhz | 1276MHz | ||
| Max Boost Clock | 1215MHz | 1452MHz | ||
| Memory Clock | 7GHz | 7.8GHz | ||
| Max Voltage | 1.162v | 1.218v | ||
Even when packing 8B transistors into a 601mm2, the GM200 GPU backing the GTX Titan X continues to offer the same kind of excellent overclocking headroom that we’ve come to see from the other Maxwell GPUs. Overall we have been able to increase our GPU clockspeed by 200MHz (20%) and the memory clockspeed by 800MHz (11%). At its peak this leads to the GTX Titan X pushing a maximum boost clock of 1.45GHz, and while TDP restrictions mean it can’t sustain this under most workloads, it’s still an impressive outcome for overclocking such a large GPU.
The performance gains from this overclock are a very consistent 16-19% across all 5 of our sample games at 4K, indicating that we're almost entirely GPU-bound as opposed to memory-bound. Though not quite enough to push the GTX Titan X above 60fps in Shadow of Mordor or Crysis 3, this puts it even closer than the GTX Titan X was at stock. Meanwhile we do crack 60fps on Battlefield 4 and The Talos Principle.
The tradeoff for this overclock is of course power and noise, both of which see significant increases. In fact the jump in power consumption with Crysis is a bit unexpected – further research shows that the GTX Titan X shifts from being temperature limited to TDP limited as a result of our overclocking efforts – while FurMark is in-line with the 25W increase in TDP. The 55dB noise levels that result, though not extreme, also mean that GTX Titan X is drifting farther away from being a quiet card. Ultimately it’s a pretty straightforward tradeoff for a further 16%+ increase in performance, but a tradeoff nonetheless.
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FlushedBubblyJock - Saturday, March 21, 2015 - link
Wow, it's stomping all over 2 of AMDs best gpu's combined.It's a freaking monster.
cykodrone - Saturday, March 21, 2015 - link
I actually went to the trouble to make an account to say sometimes I come here just to read the comments, some of the convos have me rolling on the floor busting my guts laughing, seriously, this is free entertainment at its best! Aside from that, the cost of this Nvidia e-penis would feed 10 starving children for a month. I mean seriously, at what point is it overkill? By that I mean is there any game out there that would absolutely not run good enough on a slightly lesser card at half the price? When I read this card alone requires 250W, my eyes popped out of my head, holy electric bill batman, but I guess if somebody has a 1G to throw away on an e-penis, they don't have electric bill worries. One more question, what kind of CPU/motherboard would you need to back this sucker up? I think this card would be retarded without at least the latest i7 Extreme(ly overpriced), can you imagine some tool dropping this in an i3? What I'm saying is, this sucker would need an expensive 'bed' too, otherwise, you'd just be wasting your time and money.sna1970 - Saturday, March 21, 2015 - link
What dual GTX 980 Anand ?for 2 x $300 Gtx 970 you will get the same or better performance than Titan X for $600 ONLY.
almost same power as well.
$1000 for this card is too much , Just tooooo much.
rolfaalto - Saturday, March 21, 2015 - link
So much silly complaining about value. This is an incredible bargain for compute compared to Tesla -- absolutely crushes at single precision for a fraction of the price! For my application the new Titan X is the absolute best that money can buy, and it's comparatively cheap. So, I'll buy 10 of them, and 100 more if they work out.rolfaalto - Saturday, March 21, 2015 - link
... and the 12GB is the deal maker, 6 GB on the previous Titans was way too little.yiling cao - Sunday, March 22, 2015 - link
for people using cuda, there is just no AMD option, Upgrading every nvidia new releases.Antronman - Sunday, March 22, 2015 - link
Or, if you're the kind of person who actually needs CUDA and isn't just using it because they made a mistake in choosing their software and just chose something with a bloated price tag and fancy webpage then you get a Quadro card instead of wasting your money on a Titan.You know. The sort of people who need Solidworks because they're working for a multimillion or even multibillion dollar corporation that wants 3D models or is using GPU computing, or if you're using Maya to animate a movie for a multimillion dollar studio.
Even if you're an indie on a budget, you don't buy a Titan. Because you won't be using software with CUDA or special Nvidia optimization. Because you won't be using iRay.
With the exception of industry applications (excluding individual/small businesses), Nvidia is currently just a choice for brand loyalists or people who want a big epeen.
r13j13r13 - Sunday, March 22, 2015 - link
titan x vs R9 295x2MyNuts - Sunday, March 22, 2015 - link
Ill take 2 pleaseXsjado Koncept - Sunday, March 22, 2015 - link
Your "in-house project developed by our very own Dr. Ian Cutress" is garbage and is obviously not dividing workloads between multi-GPUs, a very simple task for any programmer with access to Google.It's plain as day to see, but gives NV the lead in another benchmark - was this the goal of such awful programming?