Not to be confused with a similar sounding monster, the ASUS GeForce GTX Titan graphics card brings supercomputer power to gaming and multimedia. At its heart is fully-fledged NVIDIA Kepler technology, made available for the first time to consumers. Previously, the “big” Kepler GPUs were reserved for NVIDIA’s Tesla range of professional graphics cards which typically find homes in supercomputers and workstations.
You have 144 frames per second to comply
The new GTX Titan card takes the Tesla K20X design and modifies it for gaming use. The results are quite spectacular. Compute power is around 4.5 teraflops, with 2688 CUDA cores. 6GB GDDR5 video memory, and 288GB/s bandwidth. This is a mammoth DX11.1 graphics card specifically designed for the most detailed gaming, especially multi-screen, 3D, and beyond 2560 x 1600.
NVIDIA GPU Boost 2.0 technology pushes the gigantic GPU to 876MHz, which is quite fast for something this powerful. The video memory runs at 6GHz. Despite being twice as powerful as a GTX 680, the GTX Titan isn’t bigger in form factor, nor does it require a bigger power supply than the one you likely already have as the TDP is a mere 250W. The engineering specifically aims to achieve superlative power with low noise and heat levels, and it’s quite successful at this.
Probably smart enough to unbox itself
Why call it Titan? Well, first of all, this is the most powerful single-GPU graphics card to date and it’s named in honour of the supercomputer found at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Yes, a supercomputer. If you get all excited about your games running like oiled lightning, please refrain from saying the words “thermonuclear war” around this thing.
ASUS of course puts its own spin on GTX Titan. Beyond the trademark quality we get GPU Tweak which allows us to easily change clock speeds, voltages, fan speeds, and game-specific profiles.
The ASUS GTX Titan will begin shipping 25 February, but do realise you need to be really hardcore to go for one, as the price tag reflects the power…check with your local retailers for more info!
Suds McSoapdish
Thirty years ago, toddler Suds got his first taste of just how enjoyable technology can be when his parents gave him an Atari 2600. He soon picked up on the wonders of the Commodore 64, and the rest is history in the form of a long list of consoles, 80’s home computers and PCs built and assembled with great fervor. Writing and technology gradually moved up from hobbies to professions as Suds became the man he is today, and although he’s worked and traveled the world and experienced many things, technology, especially computing and gaming, has remained a solid constant.