Nvidia GeForce GTX 780 Ti Review

The Card

Unlike with the GTX Titan, Nvidia will be allowing its board partners to produce custom GTX 780 Ti boards, and these will be available in December. However, the 267mm dual slot reference card is, like the GTX Titan and GTX 780 before it, rather gorgeous. The black and silver aluminium casing is made all the more striking by the window and green LED backlit logo along the side. By comparison, the stock models of the R9 290 cards look decidedly bland.

The cards outputs are the standard selection of two dual link DVI ports (one DVI-I, one DVI-D) alongside an HDMI connection and full size DisplayPort. This means Nvidia has maintained VGA support (through the DVI-I connection) rather than drop it as AMD has done with the R9 290 cards.

Looking at the PCB itself, we see the massive GK110 GPU flanked on three sides by the twelve 256MB memory chips. Unlike the GTX Titan, which has 6GB VRAM, there's no need for Nvidia to double stack these, so you won't find any memory chips on the rear side.

Unlike AMD's new cards, the GTX 780 Ti still relies on external bridges to enable multi-card set-ups, and as such you'll find two SLI connectors in the usual place as well.

The card relies on additional power from its two PCI-E power connections, one 6-pin and one 8-pin, and these are both top-mounted. We also find the GTX 780 Ti using the same power delivery system as the GTX 780 and GTX Titan, namely six main power phases for the GPU and two extra ones just behind them for the memory chips, for a total 6+2 phase power.

The radial fan (complete with hub cap) draws cool air into the card over a small heatsink that covers power circuitry, blasts it over the main GPU heatsink and exhausts it out of the rear I/O panel, thus avoiding any heat being dumped into your chassis. The GPU heatsink itself sits atop a vapour chamber, and a metal plate with thermal pads provides cooling for all twelve GDDR5 memory chips and the power phases too.