Introduction

NVIDIA's latest addition to their lineup is the GeForce GTX 780 Ti. Built around a fully unlocked GK110 Kepler GPU, it comes with 2880 shaders, which boosts the card's performance beyond that of the GTX Titan. Unlike the GTX Titan, which has 6 GB, the GTX 780 Ti comes with 3 GB, but that difference won't have an effect on even the latest titles.

The GeForce GTX 780 Ti is designed to be a gamer's card throughout. It has all the muscle any game could possibly need and has another thing going its way: better thermals. Despite the "GK110" featuring more transistors than "Hawaii" (7.08 billion vs. 6.20 billion) and, hence, a bigger die (561 mm² vs. 438 mm²), GK110-based products are inherently cooler because of higher "Kepler" micro-architecture performance-per-watt figures than AMD's "Graphics CoreNext," which translates into lower thermal density and, in turn, lower temperatures and less noise. Energy efficiency and fan noise are really the only tethers NVIDIA's high-end pricing is holding on to.



ASUS not only revamped the GTX 780 Ti board design, but also placed the latest variant of their dual-fan DirectCU cooler on the card. The ASUS GTX 780 Ti DirectCU II is also overclocked to a base clock of 954 MHz out of the box, which is a good increase over stock, but not the highest we've seen on custom GTX 780 Ti cards.

At $730, Asus's card is priced just a little bit higher than the reference design, which makes it an interesting option compared to a pure reference design card, while still being cheaper than more expensive custom variants.