PNY GeForce GTX 780 XLR8 OC Review

Conclusion

While many people will still scoff at the idea of spending £400 on a graphics card, for those who don't the PNY GTX 780 XLR8 is an excellent deal. GTX Titan is all but irrelevant to gamers now, and the proximity of this card's performance to that of the GTX 780 Ti makes that card look like ever poorer value for money too. There's also the R9 290 series to consider, but we'd only recommend the R9 290X over this card if you're investing in 4K, as elsewhere the GTX 780 XLR8 easily outperforms it for about £30 less and without the power, heat and noise issues that AMD's card is known for. On the cheaper side, the R9 290 is still a very good deal too if you want to spend a little less, but non-reference versions of this should be here before the year is out, hopefully bringing with them the potential for cooler, quieter and faster R9 290 cards that could well be worth waiting for.


The additional overclocking headroom on this card is the cherry on top, but the whiny power circuitry is the tooth hurting stone inside that cherry. Without it, the card would be excellent in terms of noise, as the high performance cooler could happily keep things under control at lower speeds than it typically runs, and it isn't all that noisy to begin with. We should emphasise again that in our experience the volume wasn't so much the issue as the actual pitch of the sound itself, so it could be drowned out with relative ease and may not even affect all cards. Nevertheless, we shouldn't be seeing it at all at £400, and so it's this alone that prevents PNY's otherwise excellent GTX 780 XLR8 from winning our highest award.

Please note that while Scan is, at the time of writing, out of stock of this card without an ETA, both Scan and PNY's UK team have confirmed to us that the listed price is correct.