EVGA’s reference GTX 780 meets the R9 290X OC

We received a reference 3GB EVGA GTX 780 video card on loan from EVGA so that we could build our GeForce GTX 780 SLI Battlebox.  The reference GTX 780s are preferred for SLI configurations where there is no extra space between the cards.  We also had a month to game almost exclusively with this card while we watched Nvidia adjust the price down from $649 to $499 in response to AMD’s R9 290X release.

Last Thursday, we saw Nvidia release its new $699 flagship.  The GTX 780 Ti is Nvidia’s brand-new single-GPU flagship video card based on GK110 just as the $1000 Titan and the GTX 780 are.  The GTX 780 Ti replaces the GTX 780 as flagship, and both are offered with a 3-game Holiday Bundle including Assassin’s Creed IV–Black Flag, Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell: Blacklist and Batman: Arkham Origins.  EVGA also offers Rise of the Triad as an additional bonus.  In view of AMD’s new releases and focusing particularly on the reference $549 R9 290X and the $579 PowerColor OC (overclock) BF4 edition, we want to see if the $519 EVGA reference GTX 780 is a good value.

Please refer to our launch article to see the specifications and features of the reference GTX 780.  We are going to focus on its performance and especially on overclocking it beyond its base clocks as we set it against the GTX 780 Ti ($699) as well as versus the R9 290X/OC ($549/$579).

The EVGA GTX 780 Reference edition

There are many varieties of the GTX 780 with their suggested base price starting at $499 which also include some factory overclocked SKUs. Here are comparisons of some EVGA GTX 780 pricing, remembering that we chose the reference version for its ease of use in pairing with another in SLI:

· EVGA GeForce GTX 780 3GB with ACX cooler – $499.99

· EVGA GeForce GTX 780 3GB SC Superclocked – $529.99

· EVGA GeForce GTX 780 3GB Reference Edition – $519.99

Currently the EVGA GTX 780 3GB ACX cooler version is $499.99 at Newegg and at Amazon. We need to ask, is the EVGA GTX 780 3GB reference version worth $519 and how does it compare to the more expensive 290X ($549) and to the 780 Ti ($699)?

For this evaluation, you will see us pit the EVGA reference GTX 780 3GB at factory clocks (863/6000MHz) and also further overclocked, against our PowerColor overclocked R9 290X (Uber 1030/1500MHz), and also with stock Uber and with Quiet modes at speeds of up to 1000MHz/1500MHz. We are also going to compare with the reference GTX 770 2GB plus 7 other enthusiast-class cards to give the reader ABT’s “Big Picture”.

For this evaluation, we are benching with 30 modern games and 4 synthetic benchmarks at 1920×1080 and 2560×1600 resolutions.  Since we do not want any chance of our CPU “bottlenecking” our graphics, we are testing all of our graphics cards by using our Ivy Bridge Intel Core i7-3770K at 4.50GHz, 16 GB Kingston “Beast” HyperX DDR3 at 2133MHz, and an EVGA Z77 FTW motherboard. The EVGA Z77 FTW motherboard features 16x + 16x PCIe 3.0 specification for CrossFire/SLI. The Core i7-3770K at 4.5GHz is more than enough to differentiate even high-end video cards at high resolution and at high detail settings.

Before we look at our test bed and run benchmarks, let’s unbox our EVGA GTX 780 3GB reference edition and look at its specifications.