Nvidia’s Titan arrives to take the performance crown – the Preview
A look at the Titan
Nvidia has redesigned their GEFORCE logo and the Titan and the GTX 690 are described as “Exotic Industrial Design”. They are the first “designer” cards from either Nvidia or AMD and its “looks” are part of the design for efficiency and cooling.
Like with the GTX 690, the frame of the GTX Titan cover is made of cast aluminum, and it is protected with trivalent chromium plating. Trivalent chromium gives the GTX Titan its look and is is very durable. The fan housing of the GeForce GTX Titan is made from injection molded magnesium alloywhich is used for its light weight, heat dissipation, and acoustic dampening properties.
A 10-phase power supply with a 10-layer 2oz copper PCB provides high-efficiency power delivery with less resistance, lower power and less heat generation. Lower power and less heat also enhances the board’s longevity, while the added PCB layers provide maximum signal integrity.
To create the intricate geometries required for the fan housing, Nvidia used a form of injection molding called thixomolding, in which liquid magnesium alloy is injected into a mold. Each Kepler GPU has its own distinct cooling unit. A clear polycarbonate window allow you to see the vapor chamber that play such a critical role in cooling the GK110 GPUs.
The GeForce GTX logo on the edge of the TITAN board is LED backlit. The lettering is laser-etched, ensuring precise design. This LED acts as a power indicator, lighting up when the board is in use. The intensity of this LED can be manually adjusted using tools provided by the AIB manufacturers. With some cards, the intensity can be based on GPU utilization, so the LED will shine brighter as GPU utilization increases.
Here are the connectors on the Titan backplate: 
There are two dual link DVI ports, a Display Port and a HDMI port. Only one adapter is needed for 3-Panel gaming using Nvidia’s Surround.
Quiet Gaming
Titan’s self-contained cooler consists of a copper vapor chamber and a dual-slot heatsink while an aluminum baseplate provides additional cooling for the PCB and board components.
Nvidia uses an axial fan that has optimized the fin pitch and angle at which air from the fan hits the fin stack as the smoother the airflow, the lower the noise output. The section of the baseplate directly underneath the fan is carved with low-profile channels to encourage smooth airflow, and all components under the fan are low-profile to minimize turbulence and create an efficient airflow.
The gamer using a GTX Titan gets treated to a less-perceptible noise. When you listen to the fan alone – even at 80 percent, it’s clean and smooth – and this is especially contrasted with the HD 6990, a very noisy card, and to a lesser extent even with the GTX 590 and it is even quieter than the GTX 680. At 95% fan speed, it is noticeable but muted compared with most other high end cards running at full blast. At regular fan profiles we never reached an intrusive level over our Cooler Master Seiden Water cooler and Thermaltake case fans – even under maximum load in gaming; we generally did not hear the GTX Titan’s fan over our PC’s other cooling fans.
SLI and Tri-SLI
The GTX Titan is set up for Tri-SLI by using three GTX Titans.
That’s $3,000 worth of Titan pictured above.
The specifications look extraordinary with solid improvements over just about anything else with the exception of the GTX 690. Let’s check out performance after we look at our test configuration on the next page.
holy geeeez
Hi there, first of all thank you for a great site. I love your extended benchmark suite, it’s so great to see a site not use the same few games again and again. I have a few things though, that I’m missing.
1) It would be nice if you could take a screenshot of the image settings in the Catalyst and nvidia control panel. There are just so many settings, and I’m not quite sure how to interpret what you write.
2) Looking at your previous “The war of the WHQL” article, I was missing an easy way to compare the overall performance. Something like a performance index with and without AA would be great. And perhaps highlight the highest score in the table
3) I’m not sure what the most normal/popular clock speed of the 680 and 7970 is, but since few people buy reference cards, I think you should use a clock speed that more closely resembles what people get when they buy an Asus, MSI or Sapphire card and so on. The performance difference is quite large between the slowest and fastest Asus 670 for instance. The TOP model (which I think is the most popular one), has a GPU Boost Clock of 1137 MHz and a GPU Base Clock of 1058 MHz, compared to a GPU Boost Clock of 980 MHz and a GPU Base Clock of 915 MHz. In benchmarks the fastest model is a lot faster, there is really a big difference but many don’t seem to pay any attention to it. Also your 7970 is listed as overclocked? I’m not sure what the most popular speed of a 7970 is again, but it just caught my eye.
4) Don’t stop testing for smoothness
Thank-you for your comments.
1) As to the control panels, they are set to default (“use application settings”) except that Nvidia’s has power limitations removed, High Quality is used instead of Quality and Vsync is off. In the AMD CP, High Quality is used instead of quality, surface and other optimizations including tessellation are OFF (application settings override CP setting)
2) We almost never bench without AA. We do highlight the highest scores when we are only looking at two sets of drivers to see the performance changes. We don’t usually do it when we are comparing 4 sets of drivers (2-AMD and 2-Nvidia)
3) We use the reference clocks for a GTX 680 and the reference clocks for a HD 7970 at GHz speeds (with the boost locked on)
4) We are resuming frame time benching this week
You might consider joining ABT forum. We’d love to have your input there!