Gigabyte GeForce GTX Titan 6GB Graphics Card Review

Moving all the goodies aside, its time for the feature event and time to finally get our hands on Titan. The first thing that is very clear is that Gigabyte have not made one single change to the design of the card and the only indication that this is a Gigabyte is given by two small product number stickers on the front and back of the PCB and a larger Gigabyte branding sticker that lies on the front edge of the card.

On the leading edge of the card we find the GeForce GTX branding which lights up when the card is on.

Keeping the powerhouse cool is an important part of the Titan and NVIDIA have used a vapour chamber based heatsink with one of the biggest cooling areas that they have ever used due to the extended fins on the heatsink. The advanced fan control now monitors and adjusts the voltage and RPM to maintain the optimum fan speed and core temperature.

With an impressive TDP of 250W, we find a 6-pin and a 8-pin power connector on the card to provide power.

The GK110 silicon is capable of 3-way SLI scaling so two SLI connectors are present if the power of one is not quite enough.

Finally moving round to the I/O we find a fairly standard NVIDIA output array with two DVI (one DVI-D and one DVI-I), a single HDMI and a full sized DisplayPort. The rest of the backplate is filled with grills to allow hot air to pass through and away from the card.

One specification that some will find shocking is the lowered operating frequencies that the GK110 core on the Titan runs at. Due to the high number of CUDA cores that the GK110 silicon contains, we find the core clocked at a mere 837MHz, boosting to 876MHz, but we have to also take into account that this boost is not more dynamic and can go higher due to the tweaks that can be make to the temperature target as well as the power target. All 6GB of the GDDR5 memory remains at a standard 1502MHz (6004MHz effective). When it comes to overclocking later on, we could be potentially looking at some impressive percentage gains, but if these actually have any real world effect or not is to be found out once we’ve had a look at the baseline performance figures.