NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780 Review

The new NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780’s design language is similar to the company’s current flagship, single-GPU powered card, the GeForce GTX Titan, which should come as no surprise considering the cards are built around the same GPU.

As was listed in the specifications on the previous page, the GeForce GTX 780 is outfitted with a GK110 GPU, with a base clock of 863MHz and a Boost click of 900MHz. Unlike the GK110 on the Titan, however, two SMs (Streaming Multiprocessors) are disabled on the GTX 780, which brings the card’s CUDA core count down to 2304, from Titan’s 2688. The number of active texture units also decreases from 224 on Titan to 192 on the GeForce GTX 780.

The GeForce GTX 780’s 3GB frame buffer—half the size of Titan’s 6GB--is clocked at 6008MHz (effective GDDR5 data rate) and the memory links to the GPU via a wide 384-bit interface. At those clocks, the GeForce GTX 780 offers up a peak textured fillrate of 165.7 GTexels/s and 288.4 GB/s of memory bandwidth, which should place the GeForce GTX 780 among the fastest single-GPU powered graphics cards available today.

Like the GeForce GTX Titan, the GeForce GTX 780 is outfitted with a frame made of aluminum to add rigidity. And the card has a metal fan housing as well. The GeForce GTX logo along the top edge of the card lights up like the Titan’s too, and the brightness can be controlled via software as well.

The actual cooling hardware on the GTX 780 consists of a large vapor chamber with a densely packed, nickel-plated aluminum finstack, and large rear-mounted barrel-type fan with user-adjustable fan curves. Like the GeForce GTX Titan, the GTX 780 also uses low-profile components on about the front 65% of the PCB around the GPU, and the card’s cooler has a flat, ducted baseplate for unobstructed airflow, which minimizes turbulence and helps quiet down and better cool the card.

There is a window cut into the fan shroud that shows off the finstack (under a sheet of Lexan), and due to the fan configuration, virtually all of the heat produced by the card is exhausted from a system. Cards with centrally mounted axial-type fans, expel some of the heated air from the system, but dump the rest back into the case.

As evidenced by the pair of SLI edge connectors at the top of the card, the GeForce GTX 780 supports up to 3-Way SLI, and because the TDP of the card is only 250 watts, single 8-pin and 6-pin supplemental PCI Express power feeds are all that are required to power the GTX 780.

Outputs consist of a pair of dual-link DVI outputs, a full-sized DisplayPort output, and an HDMI connector. The GeForce GTX 780 should have more than enough muscle to push multiple displays simultaneously, and as such, it supports NVIDIA's 3D Vision Surround technology as well.