ASUS GeForce GTX Titan Takes Over

Straight out of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory's Titan supercomputer, the ASUS GeForce GTX Titan is somewhat of a rarity in the graphics card landscape. This giant uses enhanced NVIDIA Kepler GPU architecture, based on the NVIDIA Tesla K20X design, which uses the "full" Kepler GPU layout. In other words, if you get one of these you can say you have a supercomputer for a graphics card. Or thereabouts. Or twice the performance of a GTX 680, to be more exact.

The compute power is phenomenal, and culminates in the most impressive single-GPU graphics card to date: 4.5 teraflops on 2688 CUDA cores. If my math and memory are correct, I believe that's about a thousand CUDA cores more than a 680. You also get 6GB GDDR5 with a 384-bit interface and 288GB/s bandwidth. I'll hold on the Skynet jokes. Needless to say, with this much power multi-screen gaming is a cakewalk, and 2560 x 1600 seems so pedestrian at full ultra. 

At the same time, the ASUS GeForce GTX Titan isn't bigger than your average top of the line graphics card. You don't need to house it in its own shed or bunker, your existing case and PSU will suffice: the TDP is just 250W.

Clocks are quite nice for something this intense. The overlord, I mean GPU, runs at 876MHz (GPU Boost 2.0 speed), and the GDDR5 is set to the now-standard 6GHz or so. Still, this is a quiet and cool card. In terms of noise and heat, it's really not that different from the 680 and 7970.

However, in this case twice the performance means a bump in price tag, so you may want to take a look at your financials before getting all excited. This is to be expected from a graphics card derived from technology that's routinely mentioned in the national defense budget.

So if you're really hardcore, time to prove it. This one is a monster, and of course comes with the ASUS quality guarantee plus flexible and friendly GPU Tweak, which helps you tame the behemoth.

I'd post more photos but I think they redacted them.