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Today's review is unusual in that it came to fruition solely because of reader feedback. Nothing has surprised me today – we already knew based on the specifications that the Titan Black would be a very costly solution if all you wanted to do was play games.
To be fair, Nvidia have never said the Titan Black was designed just for the gaming audience and this is why they didn't sample them to review sites like KitGuru. In the real world however, and regardless of what Nvidia may say, it hasn't stopped gamers buying one or even two Titan Black cards to play the latest Direct X 11 games. Our Facebook page has seen plenty of GTX Titan Black system builds shared since they became available.
Today we compared the £800 Titan Black against a £500 Palit GTX 780 Ti JetStream. Even with a 3GB memory deficit, the overclocked GTX780 Ti Jetstream leads all of the game benchmarks. We know when Nvidia released the GTX 780 Ti many readers complained that the 3GB of GDDR5 wouldn't be enough to power games at Ultra HD 4k without running into memory related problems. Of course this may be a problem in the future, but for the time being, that 3GB of GDDR5 is adequate to power the latest games at Ultra HD 4K.
While we presented a handful of popular Direct X 11 games in this review today, we did analyse other titles behind the scenes and none of them used more than 2.5GB of graphics memory, even at Ultra HD 4K (3840×2160) resolutions. The only game which gave a moderately interesting result at Ultra HD 4K was Tomb Raider at the highest image quality settings. Even though the Palit GTX780 Ti Jetstream OC has a clear clock advantage, we were getting (almost) identical results between the GTX780 Ti and Titan Black.
As a pure gaming solution it would be difficult to recommend the Titan Black right now. The 6GB of GDDR5 memory does nothing to enhance game performance over a (widely available) GTX780 Ti at Ultra HD 4K and the extra £300 would be better spent in other areas – such as a processor and memory upgrade for the system.
It goes without saying that we know that some people will just have to buy the GTX Titan Black and on this basis it is certainly very capable. If bragging rights is important then why not? Not only is the Titan Black an extremely formidable solution ‘out of the box', but there is also plenty of additional clock headroom available on the core – we managed to overclock our sample from 890mhz to almost 1,100mhz.
We also have to credit Nvidia for their excellent reference coolers. Obviously it is no match for the hefty three fan heatpipe Jetstream cooler found on the Palit GTX780 Ti, but when compared to AMD's reference coolers, it is easily superior. AMD always struggle to create a reference cooler, but Nvidia have had a higher success rate – aided by the fact that their latest flagship hardware runs cooler than the AMD R9 290/X.
Bragging rights aside, if you have £1,000 burning a hole in your pocket right now and you want the fastest graphics performance for gaming at Ultra HD 4K, then we suggest you pick up two GTX 780 Ti's and SLi them.
AMD lovers need not get too downhearted. It is worth pointing out that Sapphire will be releasing new 8GB R9 290X Toxic and Vapor X custom graphics cards – we will keep you updated on this as we get more information.
You can buy the Palit GTX 780 Ti Jetstream OC from Amazon. It recently received a price drop to £505 inc vat. It still remains our number one buy.
Nvidia's GTX Titan Black is still in limited supply, but you can normally find one if you look around. Check Overclockers UK, or SCAN for up to the minute availability.
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