 Whistle Thump Keyboard sounds Whoosh Ding Welcome to my NVIDIA GeForce GTX Titan unboxing. This has a completely different naming scheme. As you can see, I have already actually broken the seal once, but we had a bit of an error due to an errant baby that was running around our video set, so we had some difficulties with that. But, we're gonna open this bad boy up, and I really do mean bad boy. This is the fastest single GPU card on the planet. It comes packed in beautiful anti-static foam, with a beautiful bubble wrap that is carefully, painstakingly labeled, Card 4, and then more bubble wrap inside. For your thousand dollars, you get the best packaging that has ever been- No, I'm just kidding. So this is a reference board provided by NVIDIA. Rather than being one that's made by an add-in board partner such as EVGA or ASUS, which are gonna be the ones for Titan in North America. So, you will get a proper retail package with a proper warranty and all of that, but this one is just for benchmarking. Buy yours truly. So the first thing you're probably gonna notice about the Titan is that it is absolutely gorgeous. It is styled similarly to the GeForce GTX 690, with an extruded aluminum casing here, noise dampened fan, just like the GTX 680, and a polycarbonate window that shows you the extended fin stack that is actually on top of a vapor chamber cooler that covers the GPU itself. This card has 6 gigs of memory. Now, something that people have complained about in the past, particularly with the GTX 690, is not enough frame buffer on the high-end cards. So NVIDIA wanted to address this. Because a 690 has 4 gigs of memory, which is 2 per GPU, so 2 effective because you're running an SLI, the Titan has 6 gigs. So that means that these 4 display outputs here, which can be run in 3 plus 1, so 3 in NVIDIA surround and 1 additional one as an auxiliary display, can all be powered at next generation resolution. So this card is capable in a 3-way SLI configuration of even running games like Crysis 3 at 5760 by 1080 with very high details on. So let's flip the board over. So there's some RAM on this side, and to fit 6 gigs of memory on a board, obviously you're going to have to put some memory on the top of it as well. So I'm not going to let the baby touch the back of the card because I'm sure that would be a bit of a problem. So it has a 384-bit bus. This is similar to previous generation NVIDIA high-end cards, such as the GTX 480, and what other technology do we get inside? So aside from all that, there are some pretty serious improvements to the main feature that NVIDIA launched with GeForce GTX 680, so code name Kepler. Now this is more like Kepler on steroids because compared to around 1500 CUDA cores, which is what a 680 has, the Titan has 2688 CUDA cores. So in addition to just being a Titan and being generally beast, it introduces a new version of GPU boost. So GPU boost was what NVIDIA was calling their automatic overclocking. It was a dynamic changing of how the card operated in terms of its clock speeds, its volt, and its voltages. So according to a power target, so they set a power target for how much power the board was allowed to draw, NVIDIA went, oh, okay, well, as long as you're under that power target, we can ramp up the GPU clock. So you'd actually get faster performance. So NVIDIA started rating their cards for a minimum speed as well as a sort of typical boost clock. Now the problem with that is that board power is not necessarily the only factor. There's also temperatures. So board temperatures play an important role in the reliability of the GPU. So NVIDIA went, okay, well, let's do GPU boost 2.0. GPU boost 2.0 doesn't rely on the actual power that the board is drawing. It relies on the temperature that the GPU is running at. So water coolers, for example, would run their GTX 680 with a water block on it. So it would always be at a very low temperature, but you'd reach that power draw limit. So what happened was the card would stop boosting up. It would stop overclocking any further. Titan will not have that issue. If you keep the temperatures low, Titan will overclock itself very significantly. So the base clock for this guy is 836 MHz with a typical boost clock of 876 MHz. However, I've been told that a water-cooled Titan, without any further tweaking, without any overclocking, like manual overclocking, would be expected to run anywhere from around 950 MHz to 1 GHz, having done nothing, because it will dynamically see that the card is not reaching a temperature that's going to bother it, and it'll continue to add more voltage and more clock speed to the card until you reach that limit. Now another thing about the maximum voltage for the card, NVIDIA has completely overhauled the way that they handle voltage increases and overclocking. You can actually go beyond NVIDIA's recommended maximum voltage for GPU reliability. This has to be enabled by the add-in board partner, but it'll give you a warning in EVGA Precision or MSI Afterburner, or any of those utilities that says, look, this will affect the long-term stability of your card. Are you sure you want to do this? And if you say, yeah, go for it, it'll let you push it harder and further than NVIDIA has ever really allowed their customers to do in the past, past that reliability point. So, oh yes, customizability. So not only that, but GPU Boost 2 actually enables some further customization. So you can control everything from the fan profile to the maximum voltage to the clock speed. So what that means is you can say, look, I'm comfortable with 90 degrees. I'm going to set a target temperature of 90 degrees. And unlike a power-based, like a power-based target, it's not approximate anymore. The fan will ramp up as soon as it hits that 90 degree target or 80 degrees, which is what it ships at, or even 70 degrees. This allows the card to say, okay, that's the temperature the user wants to run at. So it can dynamically adjust the clock speed and the voltage of the card to make sure it runs at that temperature. So what's the application of this? Well, you could do a couple things. You could say, okay, I'm comfortable with the GPU having less performance, and I want it to run at 70 degrees, and I want it to be silent. So that means what it'll do is it'll set your fan to spin very, very, very slow until you hit 70 degrees. And then at 70 degrees, instead of ramping up the fan to compensate like previous generation cards would have done, it will actually ramp down the voltage and down the clock speeds to bring it into a lower thermal output in order to make sure that it stays silent. Or you could say, okay, look, no, no, I'm comfortable with a loud card. I'm going to move my fan curve all the way down. So as soon as it hits 80 degrees, it's already running at, you know, 70, 80 percent. So that's going to give the GPU more headroom to crank up voltages and crank up clock speeds because you're giving it more fan to work with. So this is going to be pretty much the most customizable card on the planet when it comes to tuning. The frequency you want it to run at, the voltage the GPU will run at, including setting, you know, voltages for it that it can crank up to that are higher than the reliability would dictate, and the acoustics that you can get out of it. GTX Titan is actually faster and quieter than GTX 680 by a long shot. It's also the most complex, largest GPU ever built with 7.1 billion transistors. For context, something like a Core i7-3960X has 2.3 billion transistors. And I think that pretty much covers it. Oh, yes, Lick's wanting me to show a couple of things here. So it uses a PCI Express 3.0 16x interface, which is as fast as it gets these days. The bottom of the card, which he hasn't seen yet, is also absolutely gorgeous. On the top of the card, there's some more cool things. So there's an 8-pin and 6-pin PCI Express connectors right there, two SLI fingers for three-way or four-way SLI. And check this out. The light on the top actually glows just like the 690, and you can set it to either glow less or more or even adjust the level of glowing with the GPU load itself. So you can be like, oh, OK, I want it to only glow when I'm playing games. You can set that, which I personally think is very, very cool from a modding perspective. The last thing Nvidia has added to the driver is the ability to overclock your monitor. So if you have a monitor that's rated for 60 hertz... Oh, say hi. Hey, hi. You joining us for this unboxing? Yeah. If you have a monitor that's rated for 60 hertz, sometimes that monitor is actually capable of running at 70, 80, 90 hertz. So you might have the most powerful single GPU graphics card on the planet, and it might be able to run your game at 120 FPS. But if your monitor is only outputting 60 hertz, you're only going to see 60 of those frames per second. So this has been kind of a driver hack up till now. Titan unlocks it. Now, as with any overclocking, nothing is guaranteed. So there's no one's promising that your 60 hertz monitor will run at 80 hertz, or that your 120 hertz monitor will run at 150 hertz. Who knows? Nobody knows. No one knows. Not a guarantee. However, Nvidia is giving you the option in the driver now with Titan to check and see if your monitor is capable of overclocking. This may affect the long term of your reliability for the monitor itself, and it may void your warranty for the monitor. So guys, exercise caution with any overclocking endeavor. However, at least now we have the option. So it is pretty much the most customizable gaming card on the planet, supports all those Kepler features such as adaptive VSync, and adaptive VSync does work in conjunction with the monitor overclocking. So you might go, okay, I've got 90 hertz on my monitor now. Now I can set 90 FPS and I can use adaptive VSync. So it's going to allow that card to go VSync when you're at 90 FPS, so you don't go above and get tearing, and then it'll turn VSync off as you go below it. So maybe you dip down to 85 FPS. So yeah, pretty much I think that's it at this point. Don't forget to subscribe to Linus Tech Tips for more unboxings, reviews, and other computer videos. And of course, check out all of my videos about the GeForce GTX Titan.