 This video is brought to you by the Corsair Vengeance K70 and K95. These fully mechanical keyboards are designed for performance gaming. Visit corsair.com slash Vengeance Gaming to learn more. Welcome to my 1080p performance review of the GeForce GTX 780 from Nvidia. This comes in and replaces the GeForce GTX 680 and is positioned slightly below the GeForce GTX Titan in terms of performance, spoiler alert, but significantly below the GeForce GTX Titan, which is a $1,000 card in terms of price. Our testing methodology is pretty straightforward. We always overclock all of our cards. You can find our overclocking results in the spreadsheet that is in the video description if you want to check it out. And we are using FRAPS because we don't have a frame rating capture setup yet, but we're hoping to add something like that in the future. We are only testing single GPU setups, however, so the discrepancies between FRAPS and a capture setup are not nearly as significant as they are in particularly crossfire configurations. Our testbed is our usual testbed. We've got a 3960X behind me at 4 gigahertz, 16 gigs of RAM, a P9X79 Deluxe motherboard, a 128 gig SSD powered by an Antec High Current Pro 1000 watt and cooled by a Corsair H100. We're running Windows 7 still for our test platform just because that is the way we wanted to do it. For our drivers, we're doing something we don't usually do, and we are using the latest beta drivers from both Nvidia and AMD. This is giving us the latest performance enhancements. And what's kind of cool about what you're about to see is that there have been some changes in terms of rankings. So we've done performance guides featuring some of these graphics cards on some of these games where the results are different than what you're going to see now. So remember guys, beta drivers are non-finalized and there can be weird bugs and glitchiness, which is why we try to avoid using them for performance reviews. But what you're about to see is more of a glimpse into how they perform like exactly now or even a little bit into the future. Now we're almost to the point where we're talking performance numbers, but I want to talk about some of the things that make this card special besides performance. It shares a lot with the GTX Titan. It uses the same GK110 core. It uses the same cooler with an updated acoustic profile, meaning that the fan doesn't spin up and down unnecessarily. It maintains things very steadily. It also has GPU boost 2.0, which allows you to do really cool stuff. Like you can either say, okay, temperatures be damned. I want you to run at the highest performance possible. I'm okay with 90 degrees on my GPU or and it'll perform better. Or you can say, you know what? I want my card to run really cool. I'm only comfortable with 70 degrees and the card will dynamically turn itself down in terms of voltages and clock speeds to stay within that target that you've determined. Now it doesn't have six gigs of RAM like the GTX Titan, but it does use the same PCB. So you've got support for all the Nvidia technologies, SLI, two-way, three-way, four-way, Nvidia 3D vision, Nvidia 3D vision surround with three surround displays plus an auxiliary display. And the fact that it uses the same PCB means we've got a very beefily designed card that should be great for overclocking. And once we overclock these cards, you're going to see the performance is very similar. The one thing that's missing on the back of the card here and why I have it turned around is an additional three gigs of memory. This card has three gigs versus the six gigs of memory on the GTX Titan. Let's start with Metro Last Light. And we are cranking the details on all the games for this video because these are high-end cards. And if you're spending 300 plus dollars on a card, you better be turning up the details. This is where we see how our overclocked methodology really reveals the lesser price to performance value of some of the higher-end cards when you're overclocking everything. So the GTX 780 performs almost the same as a Titan and a 7950 or performs almost the same as a 7970. Only the GTX 660 Ti really falls behind in this particular test. In Bioshock Infinite, we see about a 10% performance advantage over the 780 going to the Titan with the Titan outperforming everything and the 780 outperforming everything else. However, I'd like to take a moment while you enjoy these graphs to point out that it's about more than performance. Acoustics is a huge part of the experience, particularly for silence freaks like me. And you may or may not have noticed already that there's a significant amount more background noise to this particular segment of the video compared to the rest of it. And I'd like to see if you guys can figure out where the problem lies. In Tomb Raider, we see a bit more of a spread with the Titan outperforming the GTX 780 by about 10%, the 780 outperforming everything else by a wide margin, and then the AMD cards nice and close to the GTX 680 and the 660 Ti trailing behind. In Far Cry 3, we see another example of almost identical performance between the Titan and the 780, with the 680 falling behind significantly clustered with those other cards. This is one of those games where these look like next generation cards and everything else looks like a last generation card. In Far Cry 3 Blood Dragon, surprise, surprise, the Titan's the big winner. It's a thousand dollar video card, so it pretty much better win. I mean, it's good that it does. The 780, however, is once again only about 10% slower. But what's neat to see here is that in Far Cry 3 Blood Dragon, we've seen a significant change in the way those last generation GPUs lined up in terms of performance. So what's cool about this is the fact that Nvidia has the 680 literally on the way out of their product lineup. It is replaced as of today, but it is still getting driver enhancements that are making it perform better in these new games. And again, the GTX Titan and 780 look like they don't even belong in the same set of benchmarks as these other cards. The three gigs of RAM, particularly at 1080p, doesn't seem to hold back the 780 in any way, and it performs almost as well as the Titan, about 50% better than anything else on the field. So what do we take away from all of this? The GTX 780 looks compared to the Titan like a stunning price to performance proposition. It performs at worst, about 10% slower once you overclock them, and guys, if you're buying GTX 780s and not overclocking them, shame on you. Okay, so it performs very close to a Titan and costs significantly less than a Titan with all that cool Titan feature stuff that goes on. I mean, even the illuminated GeForce GTX logo that you can set up to breathe or you can increase the brightness when it's under a gaming load and all kinds of cool stuff like that is included on this card at a significantly lower price. Now, with all of that said, it doesn't just come down to price to performance ratio, and this is particularly of note when you look at the competition. Now, normally, I don't talk about game bundles in these videos because I don't know if that game bundle is still gonna exist six months down the line when you might be watching this, but an AMD has had the Never Settle bundle running for almost six months now, which means that I better talk about it because they are serious about this. You may or may not have noticed that a lot of the games, the 7970 did not perform the GTX 780, not by a long shot, but what's kind of neat about it is a lot of those games are included with a 7970 or AMD Radeon graphics card purchase. So it's something to think about. Make sure that you're doing the math. If you're planning to buy that game anyway, especially immediately, factor that in. But if you are looking for the balls to the walls, best performing single card solution, and single card really is what I recommend more than a dual card solution, more than a dual card setup, particularly on the AMD side where it can hurt the experience more than it actually helps it. Seriously guys, Google frame rating, it's true. If you're looking for the ultimate single card experience, I would point at this guy as opposed to the GTX Titan. It performs almost as well as a Titan, has all those cool features, and really leaves the last generation GTX 680 in the dust. Thank you for checking out this review of the GTX 780. Don't forget to subscribe to Linus Tech Tips for more unboxings, reviews, and other computer videos.