 This video is brought to you by the Corsair Obsidian 350D Micro ATX case. Exceptional expansion and cooling flexibility for compact high-performance PCs. Visit corsair.com slash obsidian to learn more. Welcome to my unboxing of the replacement for the GTX 680. This is the GTX 780 and you guys won't be able to get a box quite like this, but the contents of yours will be very, very similar. The GTX 780 is the second graphics card to use the GK110 GPU. This is the same one that's used in the GeForce GTX Titan and the same one that's used in the Tesla GPUs that power the most powerful supercomputer in the world, the Titan. So what I find inside here is a special edition collectible sticker, which may or may not actually come with your retail card. And I also don't find any of the accessories that would normally come with a retail card either. So normally you'd have some Molex to PCI Express adapters and some driver disks and all that kind of stuff. This contains absolutely nothing. So don't worry too much about that because the part that we're interested in more than anything else is this guy right here. And you might be noticing some other similarities to the Titan already because this is one sexy graphics card. Now the GTX Titan when it launched was a bit of a strange skew because it didn't even follow the normal numbering scheme. Nvidia basically came out and said, this does not fit into our regular product stack. So we're just going to call it Titan because it performs way better than anything else we have, but it comes with a significant price premium. The GTX 780 takes that technology and brings it down to a price point that's more in line with a regular GeForce card like what we're used to seeing in the past. So you can see here I've illustrated on the table kind of how this works. The GTX 780 is almost as fast as a Titan, has most of the same, well has almost all the same technology, and is significantly faster than something like a 680, about 35% faster. Not only that, but there's a couple new things that Nvidia is rolling out. So the GeForce experience, which has been in beta for a long time now, is going to be released wholesale. It'll come by default, installed by default, with your latest driver download. That means you'll get automatic driver downloads and you'll get suggested settings for popular games to make sure that you're getting the most out of the hardware you're using. Not only that, but there's going to be some other cool features coming in GeForce experience, such as ShadowPlay. ShadowPlay uses the H.264 encoder that's built into your GPU to automatically record up to 20 minutes of previous gameplay for you to cut together and make gameplay videos. What's neat about it is that it comes with about a 5% performance hit compared to running something like FRAPS, which has huge files and potentially a big performance hit, and the files are already compressed, so they're much smaller to deal with. You don't need a huge, beefy storage subsystem. So it's really cool to see where Nvidia is going, because I know a lot of game streamers who are investing in dedicated hardware for game streaming, when it might just be a matter of buying a GeForce GPU to record your Let's Plays or gameplay videos or... Who knows? I'm not promising features Nvidia is going to deliver, but let's see what they do with that very cool little bit of tech. The 780 really is intended to leave single GPU competition in the dust, but do so quietly, efficiently, and it uses a dual slot form factor, so unlike some of the non-reference cards that we're likely to see, it won't take up unnecessary space, and it'll be compatible with 3-way or 4-way SLI. Now, all along the top of the card, you can see the two SLI connectors that are going to give you that compatibility, the illuminated GeForce GTX logo that you can control in software, and a 6-pin and 8-pin PCI Express connector. On the back of the card, you see display port, HDMI, and two DVI ports with full support for Nvidia surround, plus an auxiliary display, and on the bottom of the card, it uses PCI Express 3.0 16x for the fastest connectivity. On the back of the card, we see some more of the Titan roots of this particular graphics card, because it uses the same PCB design as the Titan. See that? Except... Ah! There's RAM missing. So on the back here, you can see solder points for the other 3 gigs of memory that would be on a Titan, which has 6 gigs of RAM, whereas the GTX 780 has 3 gigs of 6 GHz GDDR5. Lengthwise, the GTX 780 is exactly the same as the Titan. So there you go. There's the two of them side by side. How sexy does that look? Which makes it slightly longer than a GTX 680, so you can see that little difference there, and slightly shorter than a Radeon 7970, because it's got that extra little bit of plastic shroud at the end of it there. Just like the GTX Titan, the card is a marvel of industrial design. Oh, it's so beautiful. I mean, the aluminum and the fins and the... Just the fact that GPUs come with metal coolers now, when you pay hundreds of dollars for a graphics card, and it really feels like something solid and weighty and just absolutely gorgeous in your hand. I mean, that combined with the fact that the GTX logo on the top is illuminated, and you can control that, making it pulsate, or you can change the intensity levels according to things like GPU power consumption, so when you're in games, it'll be more intense, when you're not in games, it'll be less intense, makes it a very, very cool, premium-feeling product to own that goes beyond just frame rates. Now, speaking of frame rates, especially in SLI, the GTX 780, compared to the competition from the RED team, does deliver a smoother experience. I'm not going to cover it in full depth now, but if you do a quick Google search for frame rating, you'll get a lot of information out there that might be a little bit confusing, so I'm going to give you a basic overview. It's not all just about frames per second anymore. It's about the consistency of the frames per second. How long was each frame on the screen that determines whether the image appears to stutter and or whether it appears to be smooth? And NVIDIA's drivers cooperate with the hardware that they've built into their cards to make the experience smoother, particularly in multi-way configurations. Because of its Kepler lineage, the GTX 780 is extremely power-efficient, but because it's still such a powerful graphics card, it's going to require at least a 600-watt power supply, according to NVIDIA. Now, I know from personal experience you can get away with less than that, but make sure you're using something that is a good quality lower than that power supply. Realistically, anything about 450 to 500 watts, if it's an extremely well-built power supply, will be able to handle something like a GTX 780. It inherits some other really cool technology from the Titan as well. Most importantly, GPU Boost 2.0. Now, the old GTX 680 at... Sort of offensive to call it old, I guess, but the GTX 680 had GPU Boost, which allowed the GPU to overclock itself in response to the fact that it wasn't consuming as much power as NVIDIA set for it as a power target. You could turn that power target up a little bit, but this also always felt like a bit of a weird relationship to me, because the thing that kills a GPU from overclocking is heat and voltage. So the fact that GPU Boost, an overclocking tool, didn't respond to temperature was weird to me. GPU Boost 2.0 is inherited from the Titan and responds to temperature, voltage, clock speed, and power. So it can do all kinds of cool stuff. You can say, okay, I'm not comfortable with the 80-degree target that NVIDIA sets by default. I want my GPU to run at 70 degrees. It'll dynamically turn its clock speed and voltage down in order to not go above 70 degrees. Then you can say, you know what, I'm comfortable with a higher temperature. I mean, I'm okay with 90 degrees. And it'll turn itself up in terms of what the power consumption it allows and the clock speed and voltage that it allows, making it actually run faster if you say you're okay with it being hotter. And it's a water cooler's delight, which is very, very cool. So you slap a water block on this thing, tell it any temperature, any power, any anything is okay. Give it all the voltage, go for it. And the card will allow itself to be at maximum clock speed all the time. And they've integrated something new. In the software, they're doing something called limiting factors, where it'll give you a little indicator next to your power or your temperature or whatever else, or your voltage that says, hey, you've reached the max for this one, this is the one holding the card back from overclocking anymore. So it's no longer guesswork. So what is the GTX 780? With 2,304 CUDA cores, a 384-bit bus, 3 gigs of memory, all the connectivity that you can pretty much want out of an extremely high-end card, and coming in at a significantly lower price point than the Titan, it's basically the premium ultra-Uber high-performance card that makes more sense than something like a Titan, but is, well, still ultra-high performance and Uber and overclockable and all that stuff. I mean, you can even overclock your display using the NVIDIA software. Thank you for checking out this unboxing and first look at the GTX 780. Let me know in the comments if you like our new style, which includes a little bit more glamour footage of the card and close-ups and cool stuff like that. And as always, guys, don't forget to subscribe to Linus Tech Tips for more unboxings, reviews, and other computer videos.