Nvidia GTX Titan review

The Nvidia GeForce GTX Titan is a single-GPU graphics card and has what Nvidia claims to be the world’s fastest GPU. It certainly has an impressive specification, with 2,688 CUDA cores and 6GB of GDDR5 memory. Regardless of whether or not it’s the world’s fastest, you’re not going to have any trouble playing the latest games with a specification like that.

The GeForce GTX Titan takes its name from the Titan supercomputer, which is currently the world’s fastest supercomputer. The Titan draws its incredible performance from 18,668 Nvidia Tesla K20X graphics accelerators, and powering the K20X is the GK110 Kepler GPU. It is the GK110 that powers the GeForce GTX Titan, hence the name.

We’ve tested the Geforce GTX Titan reference board, and in its reference configuration the Titan has a base clock speed of 836MHz but can boost to 876MHz when the GPU’s temperature is below 80-degrees Celcius. As you’d expect with an enthusiast graphics card, it’s also possible to overclock the GeForce GTX Titan for extra power. Its 6,144MB of memory is clocked at 6008MHz and the GeForce GTX Titan uses a 384-bit memory interface.

Physically, the GeForce GTX Titan is 267mm in length, making it shorter than the Nvidia GeForce GTX 690 and therefore easier to fit inside a wider range of cases. The Titan consumes two slots, as you’d expect, and it provides two dual-link DVI, one HDMI and one DisplayPort connectors which lets you run multiple monitor setups.

As for power, the GeForce GTX Titan has one 6-pin and one 8-pin PCI-E power connector, which means it should be compatible with a wider range of power supplies than the GTX 690.

Drawing comparisons with the slightly cheaper GTX 690 is inevitable, especially as the GTX 690 has a higher 915MHz clock speed and can boost to over 1GHz, but the Titan isn’t meant to replace the GTX 690. Instead, it’s intended to be used in multiple monitor setups for surround gaming, and for use with high resolution monitors.

In use, we were amazed by the relative quiet of the GeForce GTX Titan, which made a gentle purring noise rather than a loud roar. This is a high-performance graphics card you can live with on a daily basis when you’re not gaming.