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. These should in turn translate into lower temperatures and, hence, lower noise levels. Energy-efficiency and fan-noise are really the only tethers NVIDIA's high-end pricing is holding on to.



Today, we are reviewing the EVGA GeForce GTX 780 Ti SuperClocked with ACX cooler. As the name suggests, the card is overclocked out of the box, up from GTX 780 Ti's reference 876 MHz to EVGA's 1006 MHz. EVGA uses a GTX 780 Ti reference design PCB, but slapped the ACX cooler we've seen on several other models before on the card. EVGA's ACX cooler should produce better temperatures and noise, and performance, too, since NVIDIA's Boost 2.0 algorithm takes temperatures into account.

With a price of $730, the GTX 780 Ti SC w/ ACX is $30 more expensive than the NVIDIA reference design. Read on to find out if the card is worth the price increase.