Custom GeForce GTX 780 Ti Cards Compared - ASUS & Gigabyte

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780 Ti Comparison - ASUS & Gigabyte

The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780 Ti was announced in Montreal, Canada in early November this year. With just a "TI" moniker added to the top consumer graphics card from NVIDIA, most of us didn't think it would much more powerful than the existing GeForce GTX 780 - until we reviewed it. Our actual findings revealed that it had excellent performance that thoroughly sealed it as the best single GPU graphics card you can get. Part of the reason it excelled so well was because of its fully unlocked GK110 chip, with 2,880 CUDA cores and a new power balancing feature that better utilizes all power draw across it three power rails, thus enabling the card to hit new levels of power efficiency for a top tier graphics card and unmatched overclocking performance.

With so much going for just the reference design from NVIDIA, can add-in-board partners take things up a notch further? We test two such cards from ASUS and Gigabyte with custom cooling solutions to find out.

ASUS GeForce GTX 780 Ti DirectCU II OC

The ASUS card sports the DirectCU II custom cooling system, with CoolTech cooling technology. This cooling fan technology makes use of a CoolTech fan (which allows a wider angle of air flow dispersion), and a regular 80mm one to dissipate heat from fin-stack of the DirectCU II cooler. There are a total of five copper heatpipes that are in direct contact with the GPU of the ASUS card - four of which are a mix of 6mm and 8mm in diameter while the last one is thicker than usual at 10mm in diameter.

The card is also bundled with two sets of metal decals for you to customize, to a certain degree, the color scheme of the fan shroud.

Each decal package has a easy to follow pictorial guide on where to place the decals. Alternatively, you could skip them if you prefer a 'Dark Knight' look for your card.

The card sports a modestly overclocked GK110 core (for a GeForce GTX 780 Ti), which is rated at 954MHz, with a boost clock of 1020MHz. Its 3GB of GDDR5 memory is rated at the default clock speed of 7000MHz.

Besides sporting the DirectCU II active cooling, the card features an attached metal backplate for passive cooling.

Besides this metal backplate, the card also features a VRM heatsink that cools the MOSFETs of the card. They are part of ASUS' proprietary Digi+ VRM digital power delivery design that also include Super Alloy Power capacitors and chokes.

Another point to note about the card is the power connectors, the card features a pair of 8-pin Molex ones. In comparison, the reference GTX 780 Ti has a 6-pin, and a 8-pin Molex connectors. Perhaps the additional power provided will assist the card to achieve higher performance levels? We'll soon find out if this turns out to be the case in our performance testing section. The card has a 8 + 2 power phase design, with the GPU core fed with 8 phases, and 1-phase each for the graphics memory modules and the phase-locked loop (PLL) of the card’s board respectively.

For its video ports, there are two dual-link DVI ports, one HDMI port and one DisplayPort output. The options are identical to the reference GTX 780 Ti card.

We had received news from the local ASUS office that this card has an SRP of S$1,119 and has been available in stores since 20 December 2013. On first impressions, we found its price rather exorbitant!

Gigabyte GeForce GTX 780 Ti Windforce 3x OC

Gigabyte's take on the GTX 780 Ti card comes with the familiar Windforce 3x fan shroud. Compared to the chunky metal shroud of the ASUS card, the Windforce 3X looked rather lean. This card sports the new Windforce 3x 450W cooling system, which was first announced in Computex this year and has been often used in the top SKUs of its graphics card lineup. As its name implies, it features the usual triplet of cooling fans, coupled with the "Triangle Cool" technology, which is a special fin structure employed within the heatsink to reduce air turbulence and improve the cooler's efficiency.

The cooling system also sports the same copper heatpipes and RAM heatsink for optimal cooling; as quoted by Gigabyte, "the entire system guarantees the heat dissipation capability to over 450W." Such cooling will definitely come in handy as the card comes with an overclocked GK110 core, rated at 1020MHz. This is an increment of 19% over the default 854MHz operating frequency of a reference GTX 780 Ti. Correspondingly, the boost speed of the Gigabyte card is rated at 1085MHz. Despite its rather heavily overclocked graphics core, its memory modules still operate at the default 7000MHz clock speed.

The card draws power from two Molex connectors; one 6-pin, and another 8-pin. Like the ASUS card, this Gigabyte's card too sports a 8 + 2 power phase VRM design; the overclocked GPU core draws 8 phases, and the memory modules and the PLL each draws one phase.

The rear of the card presents an exposed PCB, without any metal plate unlike its ASUS counterpart.

The video connectivity options are the same as the reference card; there are two DVI ports, one HDMI port and one DisplayPort output.

Test Setup

These are the specifications of our graphics testbed:

• Intel Core i7-3960X (3.3GHz)

• ASUS P9X79 Pro (Intel X79 chipset) Motherboard

• 4 x 2GB DDR3-1600 G.Skill Ripjaws Memory

• Seagate 7200.10 200GB SATA hard drive (OS)

• Western Digital Caviar Black 7200 RPM 1TB SATA hard drive (Benchmarks + Games)

• Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit SP1

Below is the list of cards we'll be testing. For the reference GTX 780 card, we had to clock down the ASUS GeForce GTX 780 DirectCU II 3GB GDDR5 to the default operating values of the intended reference card. For the AMD Radeon HD 7970, the downclocked Sapphire Radeon HD 7970 OC 3GB GDDR5 was used. We also included the top-end AMD R9 290X "Hawaii" card, in order to have a gauge of its performance standings.

• ASUS GeForce GTX 780 Ti DirectCU II OC 3GB GDDR5 (ForceWare 331.82)

• Gigabyte GeForce GTX 780 Ti Windforce 3x OC 3GB GDDR5 (ForceWare 331.82)

• NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780 Ti 3GB GDDR5 (ForceWare 331.70)

• NVIDIA GeForce GTX Titan 6GB GDDR5 (ForceWare 331.65)

• NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780 3GB GDDR5 (ForceWare 331.65)

• AMD Radeon R9 290X 4GB GDDR5 (AMD Catalyst 13.11 Beta 7)

• AMD Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition 3GB GDDR5 (AMD Catalyst 13.9)

Note 1: In temperature and power consumption comparisons, the results used were from the data gathered from the actual reference cards. Please refer to our reviews for the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780 Ti and AMD Radeon R9 cards.

Note 2: In our overclocking testing, we overclocked the ASUS GeForce GTX 780 DirectCU II 3GB GDDR5 to simulate an overclocked reference GTX 780 card.

Benchmarks

With the detailed testing of the respective GPUs established prior, here's the distilled list of benchmarks that we'll be using for our assessment of the two custom cards:-

• Futuremark 3DMark 2013

• Crysis 3

For our temperature and power consumption tests, 3DMark 2011 was used. At the same time, let's have a look at how the add-in cards stack up against the competitors.

Here's a look at how the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780 Ti custom cards compare against the other cards:

3DMark (2013) Results

For the 3DMark (2013) testing, we put the cards through two tests: Fire Strike and Fire Strike Extreme. Both consists of extreme levels of tessellation and volumetric illumination, as well as complex smoke simulation using compute shaders and dynamic particle illumination; while the latter will push the graphical processing capabilities of the cards further with more tessellation, more particle effects and more taxing DirectCompute calculations.

The higher overclocked Gigabyte card was the obvious winner and it outperformed the slower ASUS card by a thin margin of about 4% for the synthetic benchmark of 3DMark (2013). On average, they outperformed the reference GTX 780 Ti card by about 8%. Against the GTX Titan, the custom cards increased their lead to about13%. In comparison with their worthy AMD competitor, in the form of the Radeon R9 290X card, the custom GTX 780 Ti cards were in the lead by about 9%.

Crysis 3 Results

As a gauge of their in-game performance, we put the cards through the paces of Crysis 3. The game runs on the CryEngine 3, with extreme amounts of tessellation, per-pixel per-object motion blur, Bokeh Depth of Field, displacement mapping on small terrain, particle and volumetric lighting and fog shadows, dynamic cloth and vegetation, caustics and diffuse shadows. The average frame rates generated during a fixed, rendered cutscene, is recorded to gauge each card's performance.

For both cards, their leading margins seen in 3DMark (2013) were generally widened across the board in Crysis 3. Pitted against each other, the Gigabyte card was about 2- to 4% better than its ASUS counterpart. Against the rest of the older NVIDIA cards, their margins were widened slightly, from about 9% against the reference GTX 780 Ti, to roughly 19% against the Titan. Against the GTX 780 card, the custom 780 Ti pair were about 24% better. The AMD Radeon R9 290X was no match as well as the custom NVIDIA pair outperformed it by 32% on average.

Overclocking Results

For our overclocking exercise, although we managed to achieve higher operating frequencies for the Gigabyte card, it was the overclocked ASUS card that pulled ahead marginally. To reiterate, the new GTX 780 Ti cards support both GPU Boost 2.0 and the power balancing feature that is currently exclusive to the GTX 780 Ti. Therefore, we believe as a result, the overclocked GTX 780 Ti cards achieve a somewhat similar performance levels as both these technologies attempt to maximize each card's performance level. As seen from the graphs below, all three GeForce GTX 780 Ti cards (including the reference card) managed very similar overclocking performance.

Having said that, for those interested, we calculated the performance in percentage gain from overclocking for each card just for kicks:- the reference GTX 780 Ti card achieved the highest gain of about 20.6% in comparison to its normal operating state, ASUS GTX 780 Ti card managed a 13.6% increment, and the Gigabyte card was third with its 8.3% gain. Obviously, the figures differ only because each card has a different base level of performance, but it also tells you if it's worthwhile overclocking it. In this case, if you have a reference clocked GeForce GTX 780 Ti, it makes a lot of sense to push it further. On the other hand, the need to overclock has diminishing returns for the speedier custom cooled cards as they top out at about the same performance levels as a reference-designed card.

Temperature Results

By default, all the new GeForce GTX 700 series cards have a default temperature threshold of 80 degrees Celsius to maximize upon. This is because GPU Boost 2.0 factors temperature to boost the card's operating clocks if there's available thermal, power budget to consider (you can refer to our previous write-up on how it works). Having said that, it seems that the coolers on both the ASUS and Gigabyte cards are so efficient that even with the increased operating clock speeds, the operating temperatures of these cards were only hovering about 60 degrees Celsius - at load levels!

Between the ASUS and Gigabyte cards, the latter has a much more efficient cooling system as it has higher operating clock speeds to tame, but it registered temperatures no higher than the ASUS card.

Power Consumption Results

The power consumption figures of both cards are rather interesting because it can either be said that Gigabyte is very power efficient or ASUS is drawing more power than expected.

Conclusion

Both cards turned in impressive performances and it was the Gigabyte card take took the lead on most occasions due to its higher overclocked graphics core. Further to that, the Gigabyte GTX 780 Ti Windforce 3X OC card had a lower power draw than the ASUS card and a more efficient cooler. As such, it had a very compelling package.

ASUS' offering is still good, but it just wasn't better than the Gigabyte counterpart. There's certainly nothing wrong with the ASUS card and we would wholeheartedly recommend it if you prefer a heavy-duty look to your graphics card. About the only aspect we found puzzling was its much higher power draw and we can't help but wonder if it had anything to do with the implementation of a pair of 8-pin power connectors. Perhaps ASUS thought more power draw would be advantageous for better overclocking, in light of the new power balancing technology of the GTX 780 Ti. In reality as we found out, it had almost no impact for the actual overclocked performance. If you have plans to disregard its official cooler and get down to modding your own high performance water cooling block, perhaps the extra power might come in handy to try and push the card closer to its limits, but that's a lot of effort for something that already performs rather well out of the box.

Overall, it is evident that the Gigabyte GeForce GTX 780 Ti Windforce 3x OC card is the better candidate despite the strong showing from the ASUS card. The ASUS GeForce GTX 780 Ti DirectCU II OC 3GB GDDR 5has a suggested retail price of S$1,119, but we've found its retail price to be lower at S$1,089. Gigabyte's card was also found to be similarly priced at about S$1,069. Clearly, the Gigabyte card manages to edge out its ASUS counterpart with slightly better value. However at these four-figure price points, the differences are negligible and you would be better served to consider which card's build better fits the design elements of your rig.