A ‘Force’ to be reckoned with
The Gigabyte GTX 780 Ti OC Edition is somewhat like a Maximum PC
editor, in that it is powerful and mostly silent. This is the OC
Edition we are testing, so it’s in a high state of tune right out of
the box, thanks to a colossal “WindForce” cooler that can expel up to
450W of heat—it’s almost overkill on this 250W TDP GPU. Keep in mind we
are big fans of overkill, though, particularly when this package costs
exactly the same amount of money as the reference board. So, yes, you
get all this cooling and overclocking for free.
The ultra-fancy WindForce cooler sports anti-turbulence inclined fans, copper heat pipes, and vapor chambers.
With all that cooling headroom, Gigabyte has increased the clock
speeds on this sucker from the stock 875MHz to 1,020MHz, with its boost
clock also increased from 928MHz to 1,085MHz. Since the 780 Ti’s memory
is already running at 7GHz, Gigabyte left that untouched, so it remains
at stock speeds. At
press
time the card should be bundled with three top games, but the deal is
only “while supplies last,” so check with Gigabyte or the retailer
during purchase for the bundle.
To test the Gigabyte GTX 780 Ti, we put it up against the reference
board from Nvidia, the $1,000 GTX Titan, the $650 Asus Mars 760, and the
$550 AMD R9 290X. Since this is the first retail GTX 780 Ti we have
tested, we expected it to break some benchmark records. And no surprise,
it was the fastest GPU in every test we have, except in Far Cry 3 and
Crysis 3 where it lost to the dual-GPU Asus Mars 760 by one lousy frame
per second—effectively a tie. We were impressed by how much faster it
was than the stock card, too—typically by around 10 percent—which, we
will remind you, costs the same.
The Gigabyte GTX 780 Ti overclocking performance was also
respectable, but not as good as what we saw with the reference card from
Nvidia. That card boosted up to 1,241MHz, but the Gigabyte card topped
out at 1,176MHz. Under load, the Gigabyte card performed extremely well,
hitting just 82 C and running totally silent at all times. The stock
cooler hit around 85 C when overclocked and was quite loud. Clearly, the
WindForce design reaps benefits both in acoustics and performance.
With only the reference board to compare it to, along with the less
expensive Radeon R9 290X, it’s impossible to say whether the Gigabyte is
the “best” 780 Ti, but it’s damn good, and we can’t imagine how another
vendor’s card would be any better at the same price. We can see a card
maybe outperforming it by one or two percent, and having better
software, but it won’t beat this one on price and certainly not on
acoustics.
$700, www.gigabyte.us
Mutt
Fastest GPU in the Lab; very quiet; perfect price.
Purebred
OC Guru software is meh; not the highest overclocker.
9
Benchmarks
| | Gigabyte GTX 780 Ti OC | GTX 780 Ti (Reference) | GTX Titan | AMD Radeon R9 290X (Quiet) | Asus Mars 760 |
| Driver | 331.82 | 331.82 | 331.82 | 13.11 Beta 9.2 | 311.82 |
| 3DMark Fire Strike | 10,472 | 9,953 | 9,159 | 9,638 | 9,488 |
| Unigine Heaven 4.0 (fps) | 44 | 39 | 36 | 33 | 37 |
| Batman: Arkham Origins (fps) | 61 | 51 | 46 | 53 | 54 |
| Crysis 3 (fps) | 32 | 28 | 26 | 30 | 33 |
| Far Cry 3 (fps) | 46 | 41 | 39 | 33 | 47 |
| Tomb Raider (fps) | 33 | 27 | 25 | 29 | 30 |
| Metro: Last Light (fps) | 27 | 23 | 21 | 17 | 25 |
| Battlefield 4 (fps) | 56 | 47 | 42 | 44 | 49 |
| CoD: Ghosts (fps) | 61 | 60 | 48 | 45 | 57 |
Best
scores are bolded. Our test bed is a 3.33GHz Core i7 3960X Extreme
Edition in an Asus P9X79 motherboard with 16GB of DDR3/1600 and a
Thermaltake ToughPower 1,050W PSU. The OS is 64-bit Windows 8. All games
are run at 2560x1600 with 4X AA except for the 3DMark tests.
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