GamersNexus Tears Down NVIDIA’s $3,000 TITAN V Graphics Card

It hasn’t even been a week since NVIDIA released its TITAN V out-of-nowhere (at least the third time that’s been done with a TITAN card), but that doesn’t matter. Over at GamersNexus, the card hasn’t just been bought and benchmarked, it’s also been taken apart. NVIDIA’s not sampling this card, so all of this is the result of Steve plunking down his hard-earned bucks, and being a little crazy.

The cooler of the TITAN V looks very similar to that of the TITAN Xp, just with a different color. Steve referred to it as looking like an old NES, and I can definitely see that. It’s an interesting juxtaposition, though: one of the original game consoles ever vs. the fastest graphics card ever.

On the card’s PCB, there isn’t too much to be surprised about, maybe except for the fact that an awful lot of thermal paste was used (not a bad thing, just interesting). The vapor chamber’s fin array has seen some refinements, although it’s hard to gauge the real-world differences.

On the performance front, this next video takes care of that. As with some of the TITAN cards in the past, TITAN V is focused largely at the compute market, not the gaming one. But that said, for $3,000, you’re technically be getting three cards in one: gaming, workstation, and compute. Similar things could be said about previous cards, but this one includes Tensor cores, specifically used for deep-learning and AI development. This is the most capable jack-of-all-trades GPU ever created.

In a Pascal vs. Volta comparison, the newer card doesn’t vary too much in behavior: ~84°C is the point where the temperature will be pegged, and clocks scale with temperatures as expected. That’s pretty nice, considering the fact that the CUDA core count has jumped from 3840 to 5120.

Overall, TITAN V outperformed virtually everything else in gaming, which would be expected given the extra brawn. It even proves particularly strong in the Async Compute landscape. But, to be absolutely clear: TITAN V is not designed for gaming, even if it can be used for gaming. For all we know, there could be more Volta-related optimizations in the future, once the architecture makes its way to GeForce. Gaming just wasn’t a grand concern of NVIDIA’s with TITAN V, and for obvious reasons (most gamers don’t spend $3,000 on a new GPU).

One area I’d love to see this card perform in is workstation, because while TITAN never used to be optimized for these specific workloads (3D design, CAD), NVIDIA changed that this past summer. With that move, we saw the TITAN Xp catch up to the Quadro P6000 in many tests, allowing users to eke even more pro performance out of their non-GeForce card that still happened to say GeForce on it. TITAN V should technically beat P6000 in many cases, then – which may be why this is one TITAN that costs well more than $1,000.

Either way, when NVIDIA released its Star Wars edition TITAN Xp, I was very surprised. I just couldn’t have imagined that another card of any sort would be released before 2018, leaving it at the GTX 1070 Ti. I sure didn’t expect NVIDIA to release a card right now that I assumed would arrive in the spring!