The Almost Titan: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780 Review

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by Rob Williams on May 23, 2013 in Graphics & Displays

When Titan released in February, it seemed likely that NVIDIA’s GeForce 700 series would be held off on for some time. Well, with today’s launch of the company’s mini-Titan – ahem, GTX 780, we’ve been proven wrong. Compared to the GTX 680, it offers a lot of +50%’s – but is it worth its $649 price tag?

Page 2 – Test System & Methodology

At Techgage, we strive to make sure our results are as accurate as possible. Our testing is rigorous and time-consuming, but we feel the effort is worth it. In an attempt to leave no question unanswered, this page contains not only our testbed specifications, but also a detailed look at how we conduct our testing.

Test Machine

The below table lists our testing machine’s hardware, which remains unchanged throughout all GPU testing, minus the graphics card. Each card used for comparison is also listed here, along with the driver version used.

  Graphics Card Test System
Processors Intel Core i7-3960X – Six-Core, 4.20GHz, 1.35v
Motherboard GIGABYTE G1. Assassin 2 (X79)
Memory Corsair Dominator GT 4x4GB – DDR3-2133
Graphics AMD Radeon HD 7750 1GB (Catalyst 12.9)
AMD Radeon HD 7770 1GHz Edition (Catalyst 12.9)
AMD Radeon HD 7790 1GB (Catalyst March 13, 2013)
AMD Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition 3GB (Catalyst 13.4)
NVIDIA GeForce GT 640 1GB (GeForce 306.23)
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 650 Ti 1GB (GeForce 306.38)
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 650 Ti BOOST 2GB (GeForce 314.22)
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 660 2GB (GeForce 306.23)
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680 2GB (GeForce 320.14)
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780 3GB (GeForce 320.18)
Audio On-Board Creative X-Fi Audio
Storage Kingston HyperX 240GB Solid-State Drive
Power Supply Corsair AX1200
Chassis Corsair Obsidian 700D Full-Tower
Cooling Corsair H70 Liquid Cooler
Et cetera Windows 7 Professional 64-bit

When preparing our testbeds for any type of performance testing, we follow these guidelines:

General Guidelines

  • No power-saving options are enabled in the motherboard’s BIOS.
  • No virus scanner or firewall is installed.
  • The OS is kept clean; no scrap files are left in between runs.
  • Machine has proper airflow and the room temperature is 80°F (27°C) or less.

To aide with the goal of keeping accurate and repeatable results, we alter certain services in Windows 7 from starting up at boot. This is due to the fact that these services have the tendency to start up in the background without notice, potentially causing inaccurate test results. For example, disabling “Windows Search” turns off the OS’ indexing which can at times utilize the hard drive and memory more than we’d like.

The services we disable are:

  • Windows Defender
  • Windows Firewall
  • Windows Search
  • Windows Update

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Rob Williams

Rob founded Techgage in 2005 to be an 'Advocate of the consumer', focusing on fair reviews and keeping people apprised of news in the tech world. Catering to both enthusiasts and businesses alike; from desktop gaming to professional workstations, and all the supporting software.

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