Evga gtx 780 ti review: The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780 Ti Review

Nvidia GeForce GTX 780 Ti Review: GK110, Fully Unlocked

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GK110, Unleashed: The Wonders Of Tight Binning

GeForce GTX Titan is a super-fast graphics card, right? We know it employs a trimmed-back version of Nvidia’s GK110 GPU, and sure, we’ve often wondered what a fully-functional version of the processor could do. But given the board’s once-uncontested performance lead and its butt-clenching $1000 price tag, it was never a sure thing that GK110, uncut, would ever surface on the desktop.

After all, GK110 is a 7.1-billion-transistor GPU. And Nvidia is already (happily) selling a 2880-core version into $5000 Quadro K6000 cards.

Competition has a way of altering perspective, though. AMD’s Radeon R9 290X launch wasn’t perfect. However, it taught us that the Hawaii GPU, properly cooled, can humble Nvidia’s mighty Titan at a much lower price point.

Not to be caught off-guard, Nvidia was already binning its GK110B GPUs, which have been shipping since this summer on GeForce GTX 780 and Titan cards. The company won’t get specific about what it was looking for, but we have to imagine it set aside flawless processors with the lowest power leakage to create a spiritual successor for GeForce GTX 580. Today, those fully-functional GPUs drop into Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 780 Ti.

GK110 In Its Fully Glory

That’s right—we’re finally getting a glimpse of GK110 with all of its Streaming Multiprocessors turned on. So, GeForce GTX 780 Ti features a total of 2880 CUDA cores and 240 texture units. For the sake of completeness, we can work backward: given 192 shaders per SMX, we have 15 working blocks, and with three SMX blocks per Graphics Processing Cluster, there are five of those operating in parallel, too.

GK110 as it appears in GeForce GTX 780 Ti

This is one SMX more than GeForce GTX Titan, with its 2688 CUDA cores, enjoys. So, you get 192 additional shaders and 16 more texture units. Nvidia also turns up the GPU’s clock rates too, though. Titan’s base clock is 837 MHz and its typical GPU Boost frequency is specified at 876 MHz. GTX 780 Ti starts at 875 MHz and, Nvidia says, can be expected to stretch up to 928 MHz in most workloads.

GK110’s back-end looks the same. Six ROP partitions handle up to eight pixels per clock, adding up to 48 ROP units. A sextet of 64-bit controllers facilitate a familiar 384-bit aggregate memory bus. Only, rather than dropping 1500 MHz modules onto it like the company did with Titan, Nvidia leans on the latest 1750 MHz memory, yielding a 7000 Gb/s data rate and up to 336 GB/s of bandwidth.

The design decision that’ll probably trigger the most controversy is Nvidia’s choice to use 3 GB of GDDR5, down from Titan’s 6 GB. In today’s games, I’ve tested 3 GB cards like the Radeon R9 280X at up to 3840×2160 and not had issues running out of memory. You will, however, have trouble with three QHD screens at 7680×1440. Battlefield 4, for example, goes right over 3 GB of memory usage at that resolution. You’ll be fine at 5760×1080 and Ultra HD for now, but on-board GDDR5 will become a bigger issue moving forward.

No memory back there. That means you get 3 GB on the other side of the PCB.

Is GeForce GTX 780 Ti More Titanic Than Titan?

At this juncture, the most natural question to ask is: well what about the $1000 GeForce GTX Titan? Nvidia is calling GeForce GTX 780 Ti the fastest gaming graphics card ever, and it’s selling for $700. That’s less than Titan for a card with technically superior specifications.

Titan lives on as a solution for CUDA developers and anyone else who needs GK110’s double-precision compute performance, but is not beholden to the workstation-oriented ECC memory protection, RDMA functionality, or Hyper-Q features you’d get from a Tesla or Quadro card. Remember—each SMX block on GK110 includes 64 FP64 CUDA cores. A Titan card with 14 active SMXes, running at 837 MHz, should be capable of 1.5 TFLOPS of double-precision math.

You don’t get this option with GeForce GTX 780 Ti

GeForce GTX 780 Ti, on the other hand, gets neutered in the same way Nvidia handicapped its GTX 780. The card’s driver deliberately operates GK110’s FP64 units at 1/8 of the GPU’s clock rate. When you multiply that by the 3:1 ratio of single- to double-precision CUDA cores, you get a 1/24 rate. The math on that adds up to 5 TFLOPS of single- and 210 GFLOPS of double-precision compute performance.

That’s a compromise, no question. But Nvidia had to do something to preserve Titan’s value and keep GeForce GTX 780 Ti from cannibalizing sales of much more expensive professional-class cards. AMD does something similar with its Hawaii-based cards (though not as severe), limiting DP performance to 1/8 of FP32.

And so we’re left with GeForce GTX 780 Ti unequivocally taking the torch from Titan when it comes to gaming, while Titan trudges forward more as a niche offering for the development and research community. The good news for desktop enthusiasts is that Nvidia’s price bar comes down $300, while performance goes up.

Now, is that enough flip the script on AMD and its Radeon R9 290X? The company is still selling at a very attractive (for ultra-high-end hardware) $550 price point, after all. Here’s the thing: as you saw two days ago from our R9 290 coverage, retail cards are rolling into our lab, and we’re not seeing the same Titan-beating performance that manifested in Radeon R9 290X Review: AMD’s Back In Ultra-High-End Gaming. With only a handful of data points pegging 290X between GeForce GTX 770 and 780, and quicker than Titan, consistency appears to be AMD’s enemy right now. Company representatives confirm that there’s a discrepancy between between absolute fan speed and its PWM controller, and is working to remedy this with a software update. Our German team continued investigating as I peeled off to cover GeForce GTX 780 Ti, and demonstrated that the press and retail cards are spinning at different fan speeds. But there’s more to this story relating to ambient conditions, so you’ll be hearing more about it soon.

Nvidia is seizing on this issue in the meantime, and with good reason. With clock rates ranging from 727 to 1000 MHz on our Radeon R9 290X cards, and AMD’s reference thermal solution limiting performance at different frequencies in different games, we couldn’t draw a conclusion one way or the other in AMD Radeon R9 290 Review: Fast And $400, But Is It Consistent? Can we be any more definitive about Nvidia’s response to all of the Hawaii news?

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GK110, Unleashed: The Wonders Of Tight Binning

Next Page Meet The GeForce GTX 780 Ti

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Nvidia GeForce GTX 780 Ti review

Our Verdict

If youve got a lot of cash burning a hole in your pocket, and if you can find one, the GTX 780 Ti will be the fastest graphics card youve ever had. But you’ll need to overclock to justify the expense.

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Well, it’s been a busy month for graphics card releases and we’re only seven days into November, but then we always knew Nvidia would be waiting for AMD to release it’s top end cards before issuing their own response, and here it is: the Nvidia GeForce GTX 780 Ti.

And as you would expect, it’s now the fastest graphics card on the planet. But we’re not just talking about taking the single-GPU crown either, the GTX 780 Ti can actually go much faster than the Radeon HD 7990, let alone either the GTX Titan or Radeon R9 290X.

Nvidia have had to bring out their biggest guns for this battle. The original GTX Titan was a bit of shock and awe in order to topple AMD’s Radeon HD 7970 GHz edition from the top of the benchmark tree, the GTX 780 Ti goes even further. Not even Nvidia’s pro graphics card range has used the GPU behemoth inside this card.

Perhaps AMD ought to take this as a bit of a compliment though. Nvidia hasn’t left anything in the tank here, this card represents every bit of power they’ve managed to pull out of the Kepler architecture. Like the GTX 780 and the GTX Titan before it, the GTX 780 Ti is using the GK 110 GPU Nvidia have previously reserved for their professional Tesla graphics card range. It’s a massive, powerful GPU at 533mm2 with over seven billion transistors — the GK 104 used in the original GTX 680 by comparison is relatively svelte at under 300mm2 with half the transistor count.

The Titan used the same chip as the top Tesla K20X card, with 2,688 CUDA cores making it one of the quickest single GPU cards around at the time. That still wasn’t, however, the full-fat GK 110 chip. Both Titan and K20X sport fourteen of the Kepler architecture’s streaming microprocessor (SMX) modules — each with 192 CUDA cores — to make up that 2,688 core count. The full chip though comes out of the fabs with fifteen SMX and some 2,880 cores. Because of the difficulty getting fully functional yields out of the silicon wafers at the top spec the decision was taken to go forward with fourteen. This allowed for chips without the full fifteen functional SMX modules to still make the grade.

But now because of the serious competition from AMD’s Hawaii GPU, Nvidia have had to bring out the big guns. Because the production process is now far more mature than it was a year or so ago I expect the yields on the top chips are much better than they were originally — they’re going to have to be otherwise Nvidia might be taking a bit of a hit bringing the GTX 780 Ti out at this price.

Quick chips

What does all that mean for gaming performance then? It means the GTX 780 Ti is faster than AMD’s finest, that’s what. But not by much, if I’m honest. In the synthetic benchmark of Heaven 4. 0 it shows Nvidia’s top card has the definitive edge when it comes to raw performance, but in-game — Bioshock Infinite aside — the difference isn’t nearly so pronounced.

Indeed, with Company of Heroes 2 even the second-tier Hawaii, the Radeon R9 290, is still faster than this giant of a GPU.

When you think about the fact Nvidia’s latest card is over £200 more expensive than the R9 290 suddenly all those CUDA cores don’t look so impressive. And when you’re only getting a few frames per second on average more than the R9 290X, the extra £100-odd over the top Radeon doesn’t look worth the outlay at all.

I was quite prepared to admit that while the GTX 780 Ti was indeed the new fastest GPU in the world it was only by such an insignificant amount as to barely be worth bothering about. A good demonstration of speedy Kepler architecture, but not a card I could recommend anyone buy.

Then I started playing around overclocking it. Boy, does this thing shift when you start playing around with the core and memory clocks. And even at the top settings (some 1,254MHz on the GPU if you’re interested) it was still only knocking around 83ºC and with the fans at 67% it only sounded as blowy as the R9 290X itself.

I’ve never seen any card get so close to hitting 50FPS in Heaven’s system-taxing benchmark at 2560×1600, especially not with the minimum frame rate topping 20FPS either. In my experience of basic GPU overclocking, whether DIY or factory-overclocked, most cards will net you an extra 10% performance boost at best. The GTX 780 Ti was boosting gaming frame rates by 16% at the very least, sometimes as high as 23%.

These are important speed bumps when you’re gaming at high resolutions, which is where you want to be when you’re spending £560 / $700 on a graphics card. If you’re plugging this into a 1080p screen only then you’re a mad person.

Must-have?

It’s still not got the must-have price/performance metrics of the impressive Radeon R9 290 though. That card is still an absolute bargain for the gaming speeds you can get out of it. And while the GTX 780 Ti at its top overclock does pull away, sometimes quite significantly, from the second-tier Radeon it’s still tough to argue that the extra performance is really worth the extra couple hundred you’ve got to spend on the GeForce card.

For some people it will be though. If you want the absolute best, quickest graphics card on the market right now, and one that still wont burn a hole in the side of your chassis, or deafen you at full speed, then Nvidia have got the card for you. At £560 / $700 it is a premium-priced GPU, but when you consider the GTX Titan is still selling for much, much more, it’s not actually that bad, value-wise. Fingers crossed Nvidia have sorted out the chip yields for GK 110 chips with the full fifteen SMX modules, because I’m pretty confident they could sell an awful lot of these cards. I guess we’ll see what stock levels are like over the next few days.

Benchmarks

DirectX 11 synthetic performance

Heaven 4.0 — Avg. FPS (min): higher is better

GeForce GTX 780 Ti — 40.6 (18.9)

Radeon R9 290X — 33.7 (17.4)

GeForce GTX Titan — 37.0 (18.2)

Radeon R9 290 — 31.2 (16.7)

DirectX 11 gaming performance

Bioshock Infinite — Avg. FPS (min): higher is better

GeForce GTX 780 Ti — 68 (15)

Radeon R9 290X — 57 (16)

GeForce GTX Titan — 60 (11)

Radeon R9 290 — 55 (16)

Company of Heroes 2 — Avg. FPS (min): higher is better

GeForce GTX 780 Ti — 25 (12)

Radeon R9 290X — 29 (15)

GeForce GTX Titan — 25 (12)

Radeon R9 290 — 27 (14)

GRID 2 — Avg. FPS (min): higher is better

GeForce GTX 780 Ti — 86 (69)

Radeon R9 290X — 86 (68)

GeForce GTX Titan — 77 (61)

Radeon R9 290 — 77 (62)

Total War: Rome II — Avg. FPS (min): higher is better

GeForce GTX 780 Ti — 37 (12)

Radeon R9 290X — 36 (13)

GeForce GTX Titan — 33 (12)

Radeon R9 290 — 34 (11)

Metro: Last Light — Avg. FPS (min): higher is better

GeForce GTX 780 Ti — 28 (14)

Radeon R9 290X — 26 (13)

GeForce GTX Titan — 24 (13)

Radeon R9 290 — 25 (13)

Overclocking performance

Heaven 4.0 — Avg. FPS (min): higher is better

GeForce GTX 780 Ti — 49.2 (21.5)

Radeon R9 290X — 36.7 (18.5)

Temperature performance

GPU 100% — Degrees Centigrade: lower is better

GeForce GTX 780 Ti — 83

Radeon R9 290X — 95

GeForce GTX Titan — 80

Radeon R9 290 — 93

Peak platform power performance

GPU 100% — Watts: lower is better

GeForce GTX 780 Ti — 340

Radeon R9 290X — 383

GeForce GTX Titan — 300

Radeon R9 290 — 347

Nvidia GeForce GTX 780 Ti: Price Comparison

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Nvidia GeForce GTX 780 Ti review

Dave has been gaming since the days of Zaxxon and Lady Bug on the Colecovision, and code books for the Commodore Vic 20 (Death Race 2000!). He built his first gaming PC at the tender age of 16, and finally finished bug-fixing the Cyrix-based system around a year later. When he dropped it out of the window. He first started writing for Official PlayStation Magazine and Xbox World many decades ago, then moved onto PC Format full-time, then PC Gamer, TechRadar, and T3 among others. Now he’s back, writing about the nightmarish graphics card market, CPUs with more cores than sense, gaming laptops hotter than the sun, and SSDs more capacious than a Cybertruck.

Overview of ASUS ROG MATRIX GTX 780 Ti Platinum

By presenting the GeForce GTX 780 Ti , NVIDIA removed the question of the manufacturer of the fastest single-chip video cards in the world, again pushing AMD to the catch-up position. Yes, this required a full-weight GK110 graphics chip with 2880 computing units, but this is the case when the end justifies the means. The reference design of the GTX 780Ti is quite good, therefore, as an alternative, manufacturers should only offer truly extraordinary devices. Let’s see how a well-known Taiwanese company handled it. The heroine of today’s review — ASUS ROG MATRIX GTX 780Ti Platinum .

The short but significant abbreviation ROG in the name of the device indicates that the video card belongs to the Republic Of Gamers series of gaming devices. It is easy to guess about this by the appearance of the video card.

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Chopped forms of the cooling system, bright aggressive color of the cooler elements, increased dimensions are signs that we are dealing with an original device. Thanks to the special design of the protective cover, it is easy to trace the relationship with the youngest member of the family — ASUS ROG STRIKER GTX 760 Platinum, which we recently reviewed.

GPU clock speed has been noticeably increased. Instead of 875 MHz, the base value for the chip is 1006 MHz. That is, in comparison with the recommended one, the GPU frequency is initially increased by almost 15%. The GeForce GTX 780 Ti comes standard with 3GB of GDDR5 memory running at 7000MHz. In this case, the local RAM has the same configuration.

The Matrix GTX 780 Ti Platinum is available with one of the DirectCU II cooling options. In this case, a rather massive design is used, which is based on a radiator block made of aluminum plates and a set of heat pipes that are in direct contact with the GPU.

Note that all passive cooler elements are black. Thus, the manufacturer intended to visually emphasize the special status of the device. More recently, NVIDIA used a similar technique for the exterior design of the GTX TITAN Black Edition.

The design uses 5 heat pipes of different calibers. The largest has a diameter of 10 mm, a pair of 8 mm and two more with a diameter of 6 mm. This combination makes it possible to accelerate heat removal directly from the crystal to a massive heatsink block with a large dissipation area. As you can see in the photo, three large tubes have direct contact with the GPU, while 6 mm tubes are used as auxiliary ones.

Uses two 100mm fans for airflow. One of them is made using CoolTech Fan technology. This development involves a combination of two types of impeller. Closer to the inner radius there are small blades typical for centrifugal models, on the outer radius there are blades characteristic of axial models. Such a bundle allows you to increase the area of blowing. The second fan is a classic axial type, but has an increased number of blades.

The top of the cooler is covered with a plastic casing. The central part is made in graphite color, while the lower and upper faces are highlighted in red. For external decor, three metal plates are placed along the conditional central axis.

The graphics card is equipped with a ROG Color-coded Load Indicator. In idle mode, the Republic Of Gamers logo placed on the top edge is illuminated in blue, in medium load it is orange, and at maximum it is lit in bright red. In practice, the intermediate state slipped very quickly, in fact, under load, the indicator always glowed red. It can also pulsate green, indicating the activation of a special Safe Mode.

ASUS ROG MATRIX GTX 780 Ti Platinum is expected to use the original PCB. In this case, the power of the power unit has been significantly increased. The power stabilizer circuit includes 14 phases (12 + 2). MOSFET elements are arranged in one line, but to fit the required number of components, the manufacturer had to slightly increase the width of the printed circuit board. The elements are covered with a small heatsink for additional cooling. VRM parameters are adjusted using the discrete Digi+ VRM ASP1212 controller.

Provided 3 GB of memory are recruited using 12 SK Hynix H5GQ2h34AFR-R2C chips. The chips are placed in a U-shape around the GPU.

Two 8-pin 12V connectors are provided for connecting additional power. The adapter is equipped with a system for indicating the connection of power lines. The LEDs next to the connectors are green if power is on and red if you forgot to connect the appropriate cable.

At the side edge, it is easy to notice another 4-pin Molex connector, which is used not to increase power, but to implement an interesting proprietary technology — Memory Defroster. This solution makes it possible to exclude overcooling of memory chips during the use of liquid nitrogen.

After activating the Memory Defroster with a miniature toggle switch located next to the molex connector, the area with the memory chips starts to warm up additionally. This is necessary to avoid the so-called “could bag” effect, which can occur when microcircuits operate at low temperatures. As you can see, this is another nod from the manufacturer towards those who like to get the ultimate megahertz, who are not afraid of any difficulties along the way.

For enthusiasts, there is also a separate Safe Mode button that allows you to reset all video card settings.

An aluminum plate is attached to the back of the PCB. During experiments on an open bench, it will become a good protection against possible mechanical damage. The surface has multiple perforations, because such «armor» does not impair heat dissipation. We also note that to strengthen the design, the video card is equipped with a longitudinal bracket that fastens the plate and the printed circuit board to the interface panel. An additional stiffener will not hurt here.

Despite the fact that we are talking about the top video card of the MATRIX family, the manufacturer decided to limit itself to a two-slot design of the cooling system. Previously, for older models of graphics adapters, ASUS often used COs that occupy three slots. Of course, devices that take up fewer bays are more practical, especially for multi-GPU configurations.

The equipment of the interface panel is customary. Two DVI video outputs (DVI-D and DVI-I), as well as full-length HDMI and DisplayPort.

ZMIST

1 Employment
2 in the work
3 Acceleration
4 performance
5 ASUS ROG Matrix GTX 780 Ti Platinum
6 Results
- 6.1 The device for tests was provided for tests, WW.SUS. ua

Package Contents

The video card comes with a small manual, a disk with drivers and software, two adapters from a pair of 6-pin connectors to one 8-pin, and a small sticker with the gaming series logo.

In operation

In idle mode, the graphics processor of the video card warmed up to 29C. On the «tachometer» — 1029 rpm. Perhaps it would be possible to safely reset the rpm to 200.

After all the test stages, the maximum temperature of the GPU was 75C. The indicator is quite good, especially considering that the chip on the reference GTX 780 Ti warmed up to 83 degrees. As for the fan speed, it increased to 1550 rpm. Note the rather quiet operation of the cooling system. An increase in fan speed is felt, but in general the noise emitted remains at a very comfortable level. The cooler is quieter than the one used for the reference GeForce GTX 780 Ti.

Thanks to GPU Boost, the GPU under load accelerates from a base 1006 MHz to 1150 MHz. The efficiency of the cooler is enough to keep the operating frequency at the maximum value.

Overclocking

Exploring the additional potential of the video card, we managed to increase the starting frequency of the graphics processor to 1039 MHz. Its further increase led to the appearance of artifacts under load. The relative increase is small, apparently, we came across not the most successful copy of the adapter. At the same time, it is still worth considering the significant factory afterburner. If we compare the obtained value with the base frequency of the reference models (875 MHz), the difference is about 19%. After additional overclocking, the GPU dynamically accelerated up to 1183 MHz.

The operating frequency of the memory has been increased by 10% — from 7000 MHz to 7700 MHz (1925).

The ASUS ROG MATRIX GTX 780 Ti Platinum has a range of support tools to help hardcore overclockers who want to break into the world’s top test disciplines. Obviously, the device will reveal its full potential when cooled with liquid nitrogen. In the air, the results obtained are good, but fundamentally do not stand out from those of other original GTX 780 Ti models.

Performance

The GeForce GTX 780 Ti is the fastest single-chip graphics card on the market. After AMD introduced its solutions based on Hawaii chips, in order to keep the palm, NVIDIA had to use a full-fledged version of the GK110 processor for the flagship of the desktop series, which was previously used only as part of Quadro computers. As we found out during the first acquaintance with the GTX 780 Ti, 2880 CUDA cores allow us to outperform the Radeon R9 290X by about 7-10%. The advantage, although not so significant, is obvious.

With an increased GPU frequency, the ASUS ROG MATRIX GTX 780Ti Platinum graphics card delivers an even higher level of performance. The increase is about 8–10%. Additional overclocking increases the results by another 3-6%.

The extremely overclocked Radeon R9 290X sometimes manages to get close to the performance of the ASUS ROG MATRIX GTX 780Ti Platinum in normal mode, but the additional overclocking of the GTX 780 Ti brings the device on a chip from NVIDIA to the lead.

Of course, record performance comes at a considerable price. The cost of the forced model from ASUS is about $800 (9UAH 500).

Video review ASUS ROG MATRIX GTX 780 Ti Platinum

Results

ASUS ROG MATRIX GTX 780 Ti Platinum is one of the most powerful graphics cards based on the full GK110 chip. High factory overclock allows about 10% ahead of the reference model GeForce GTX 780 Ti. The exclusive ASUS graphics card uses an efficient and unusually quiet cooling system for devices of this level. The video card has a number of interesting options for extreme overclocking with liquid nitrogen, while a reinforced power subsystem allows you to count on good results.

Liked it
+Very high performance
+ Efficient and fairly quiet cooling system
+ Substantial GPU factory overclocking
+ Additional accessories for extreme experiments with liquid nitrogen

Disliked
— High price
— Moderately overclocked air-cooled GPU

Test device provided by ASUS, www.asus.ua

Pros:
Very high performance; efficient and fairly quiet cooling system; significant factory overclocking of the GPU; accessories for extreme experiments with liquid nitrogen

Minuses:
High price; moderate overclocking GPU air-cooled

Output:
One of the most productive video cards based on the full-weight GK110 chip. High factory overclock allows about 10% ahead of the reference model GeForce GTX 780 Ti. The exclusive ASUS graphics card uses an efficient and unusually quiet cooling system for devices of this level. The video card has a number of interesting options for extreme overclocking with liquid nitrogen, while a reinforced power subsystem allows you to count on good results.

Specifications

Palit GeForce GTX 780 Ti JetStream review – more profitable than GTX 970

While the latest NVIDIA Maxwell architecture is running the show on the graphics card market, we decided to test last year’s flagship Palit GeForce GTX 780 Ti JetStream on the previous architecture as an experiment Kepler. This video card is still available for sale and, as testing has shown, is a better buy than the GeForce GTX 9 opposed to it.70.

The editors would like to thank Palit for kindly providing the video card for testing.

one.
Positioning Palit GeForce GTX 780 Ti JetStream

1.1. Specifications

1.2. Delivery set

1.3. Design and construction

1.4. Test bench configuration

1.5. Overclocking and testing

1.6. Conclusions

Quite recently, the Palit GeForce GTX 780 Ti JetStream was the flagship single-chip video card, if we don’t take into account the Titan series, which is no longer intended for gamers, but for computer enthusiasts. It is based on the most powerful graphics chip of the Kepler architecture — GK110, namely its revision 425-B1, which contains 2880 microcores. The video memory capacity of the Palit GeForce GTX 780 Ti JetStream is 3 GB, which is quite good even now, especially considering the 384-bit bus. The performance of the GTX 780 Ti is roughly comparable to the brand new GTX 970. In some games, the GTX 780 Ti is slightly weaker, in others, on the contrary, it is slightly more powerful and is already approaching the GTX 980. At the same time, the GTX 780 Ti costs the same or even less than the GTX 970, depending on the city and store.

Technical specifications

Model name	Palit GeForce GTX 780 Ti JetStream
Graphics chip	GK110-425-B1
Architecture	Kepler
Process	28 nm
Number of stream processors	2880
Number of texture units and render units	240 / 48
Core Clock / Boost	980 / 1046 MHz
Video memory size	3 GB
Memory bus	384 bit
Memory type	GDDR5
Memory frequency	7000 MHz
Declared power level	250 W
Video outputs	Two DVI, HDMI, DisplayPort
Dimensions	284x117x51 mm

Package Contents

Palit GeForce GTX 780 Ti JetStream comes in a black gift box: with a carrying handle, a door and a transparent window underneath to admire the video card without unpacking it completely.

The outer side of the door is laconic and contains only the name of the model against the background of beautiful oriental hieroglyphs. On the inside of the door, the advantages of the Palit JetStream cooling system are detailed, and on the back of the box, the strengths of the GeForce GTX 780 Ti as a whole.

Palit, with its customary practicality, approached the package of the video card. In the box with the GTX 780 Ti JetStream there are no license keys for games and software, which unpleasantly increase the price of the video card and not everyone needs it, but there is a rich set of accessories.

This is a power adapter from two Molex to 8-pin, which is useful if your PSU has only one such connector (two 8-pins are required to power the video card), and an adapter from DVI to analog VGA digital video output, and where rarer DVI-HDMI, which is not available in every computer store.

Design and construction

The appearance of the Palit GeForce GTX 780 Ti JetStream can be described as elegant. The predominantly black casing of the cooling system has golden inserts, the blades of a pair of extreme fans are made glossy, and the central propeller is transparent and with blue illumination.

The result is a rather plump video card (two and a half expansion slots), but moderately long (less than 29 cm, that is, it will fit in almost any computer case) and not very heavy, the reason for which is primarily the absence of a thick metal back plate . At the end of the video card there are four video outputs: a pair of DVI and one each for HDMI and DisplayPort.

To remove the cooling system (in our case, for a photo shoot, in yours, for example, to replace thermal paste), you will have to unscrew not only four large screws, but also a dozen small ones. And in order to remove the metal radiator from the plastic casing, you also have to bend a few tight latches.

The heatsink consists of hundreds of aluminum fins divided into two sections, five copper heat pipes with a diameter of 6 mm each and a copper pad in contact with the graphics chip. If there is no back plate, then there is a front one, which cools the memory chips and power circuit elements through thermal pads. Moreover, all twelve Hynix memory chips are located on the inside of the printed circuit board, that is, fortunately, they were not deprived of cooling.

This whole structure is blown by three TurboFan Blade fans: two with a diameter of 8 cm and one central with backlight, 9see In idle, the graphics card only heats up to 32°C (room temperature 23°C) with a fan speed of 1150 rpm and noise that is barely distinguishable from other PC components. Under load, the temperature rose to a maximum of 70 ° C, and at a speed of 1800 rpm, the fans already became clearly audible (well, what did you want from a 250-watt video card?). Fortunately, the noise is low-frequency and hissing, so it is not annoying at all.

Our copy of the Palit GeForce GTX 780 Ti JetStream did not sin with the squeak of electronic components and, most likely, this model as a whole does not sin. And all thanks to high-quality electronic components: ferrite chokes, solid capacitors and DrMOS chips. By the way, the power supply circuit of the video card is made eight-phase: six phases are responsible for the operation of the graphics chip, and two more for the video memory.

Test bench configuration

Intel Core i7-6700K 4-4.2 GHz
be quiet! Shadow Rock Slim
motherboard MSI Z170A Gaming M3
RAM 2×4 GB HyperX Fury DDR4 2400 MHz
graphics card Palit GeForce GTX 780 Ti JetStream
HyperX Savage SSD 240 GB
WD Red 4TB hard drive
be quiet! Pure Power L8 630W CM

Overclocking and testing

Compared to the reference GTX 780 Ti, the Palit JetStream version has a significant factory core overclock: 980-1046 (the second number means Boost) versus 875-928 MHz, that is, more than 100 MHz increase.

But with the help of proprietary Palit ThunderMaster utility, you can achieve even more outstanding overclocking results.

So, our copy of the video card was overclocked to 1125-1191 MHz (another plus 150 MHz) in the core and up to 7660 MHz (plus 660 MHz) in memory. Additional manual overclocking increased the frame rate by 4-10 percent depending on the game. Below are the results of gaming tests at maximum graphics settings and FullHD screen resolution.

Average frame rate in games

Video card	NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780	Palit GeForce GTX 780 Ti JetStream	Overclocked Palit GeForce GTX 780 Ti JetStream	NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970	NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980
Grand Theft Auto V	34	40	42	38	45
Battlefield 4	88	102	108	98	117
Dragon Age: Inquisition	52	60	62	54	64
Far Cry 4	70	81	86	81	97
Assassin’s Creed Syndicate	33	37	40	37	44
Fallout 4	51	59	63	63	75
Dying Light	50	58	62	60	71

If by default the Palit GeForce GTX 780 Ti JetStream demonstrates performance in games at the level of the new GTX 970, then after manual overclocking it easily overtakes it and approaches the more expensive GTX 980. As practice has shown, 3 GB of video memory is not a bottleneck at all. For example, in Battlefield 4, at 100% texture resolution, only 1.5 GB of video memory was occupied, and at 200 percent, 2.5 GB. And only GTA V at 250% texture resolution was able to “eat out” the full 3 GB of video memory (the game itself recommends 3.5 GB).

Conclusions

The information that NVIDIA supposedly lowered the performance of video cards of the old Kepler architecture in new versions of drivers in order to encourage users to switch to Maxwell turned out to be just another Internet myth. Our testing of the Palit GeForce GTX 780 Ti JetStream is a clear confirmation of this. The Kepler flagship, even in the new games of autumn 2015, defeated the GTX 9 video card of a similar price.70 Maxwell, and in last year’s game Dragon Age: Inquisition, it came close, at a distance of 2 FPS, to one and a half times the more expensive GTX 980. At the time of this writing (December 2015), the GeForce GTX 780 Ti is still found in retail.