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.



The MSI's GTX 780 Ti GAMING in this review is built using MSI's famous TwinFrozr thermal solution and comes with a large clock speed increase out of the box for maximum performance. Like other MSI Gaming products, it promises to be very quiet, which is something I'm looking forward to after seeing less than impressive noise results from GTX 780 Ti cards we reviewed earlier.

With a retail price of $710, it is also reasonably priced, just $10 more than the reference design and around $20 cheaper than the more "premium" custom GTX 780 Ti models on the market by other manufacturers.