Gadgetory

it's been about a month since we tore down Sam's Titan xp for our liquid-cooled hybrid build and returning today to fully review the Titan ax Pascal as a gaming device our first content looked at thermal and framerate performance when under the stock cooler versus our custom liquid solution proving that the Titan XP improves its clock rate by an average of about 200 megahertz just by using a better cooler that's no overclock necessary by the way it's just better cooling solution letting us better clock rates and thus a better frame rate at least marginally but today we're properly going over the thermals the frame rate in various games that we didn't cover previously for the Titan X Pascal card and then we'll also talk overclocking and look at it as a standalone solution without our liquid cooling help to see if it's worth your purchase before getting to that this Titan XP coverage is brought to you by an tech and their new cube mini ITX case designed by Razer supports full custom loop liquid cooling in an SFF box you can find more information on this case in the link below the GTX Titan X Pascal is built more for production it seems like than gaming but that hasn't stopped Nvidia from haloing the card as the best for gaming out there and it is a $1000 plus card depending on where you buy it and what time of day it is I guess and today we're looking at the temperature and gaming performance things like that we're not looking at production workloads of CUDA acceleration premiere or anything like that it's strictly gaming because that is how it has been marketed pretty heavily lately so we're gonna review it from a gaming standpoint and this car just as a reminder was a loaner provided back by one of our viewers and readers so thank you for that Sam this was not an Nvidia sample because I guess I don't know they didn't want to sample us a Titan XP so this card the XP uses a GP 102 GPU that is a Pascal architecture GPU on the board GP 102 it's the largest Pascal chip presently available on a geforce card it's got more GP sees more SMS all of that stuff we'll talk about that momentarily the only larger Pascal chip presently available is the GP 100 which is only available on the Tesla P 100 accelerator that is not a gaming card by any stretch of the imagination that is a deep learning and simulation card so very different market GP 102 though is the top of the line at least in the gaming space GP 102 hosts a total of six G pcs for 28 SMS and 3584 to two cores at 128 cores per SM so if you wanna to follows GP 104 is architecture splitting gbc's mostly into sets of 5 SMS rather than following the dense or GP 100's M alignment of 10 multi processors per G PC we talked about that in our GP 100 deep dive article and video this architectural decision is because the GP 102 chip isn't meant to handle the same FP 64 double precision and FP 16 half precision tasks that you'd find on a Tesla P 100 accelerator which again is built for simulation and deep learning applications instead GP 102 focuses it scores on FP 32 useful for gaming and production applications almost exclusively also like GP 104 - 400 the Titan axpy runs 8 TM use per SM totaling 224 texture map units clock rate natively operates at fifteen thirty one megahertz with the stock cooler often hitting seventeen hundred megahertz or higher during load note also that we pushed it to nearly 2,000 megahertz in our liquid cooled content coverage stuff and that was with no overclock just as a reminder so hitting nearly 2k on the frequency range just by adding liquid and memory of course operates at 10 gigabits per second with gddr5 X from micron that is not news to anyone cache size also plays a big role in the Titan XP it's expanded to 30 72 kilobytes over 2048 on the GTX 1080 and the RAM on board is 12 gigabytes with Titan XP versus 8 gigabytes for the GTX 1080 both using the same g5 acts ten gigabit per second native memory if this architecture discussion interests you you want to learn more about what these terms mean and hit the article linked in the description below where we go into all of it and define better what the acronyms and initialisms stand for let's move on to testing note that all thermals fps noise and overclocking tests were performed before our initial teardown of the GPU so the only difference you'll see in numbers emerges after we apply to a liquid cooler to the Titan XP but all the initial numbers acted prior we've also already produced that content but we'll revisit the thermals briefly here for the rest of the testing methodology and for additional tests again hit that article in the description below recapping the basics of the thermal results the reference GTX Titan X which is basically the only card design hits its thermal limit at 83 to 84 Celsius GPU diode temperature non Delta and that's what creates the boost specification of 1531 megahertz the clock actually automatically boosts higher through GPU Boo's 3.0 when that thermal limit is bypassed by superior cooling again explained elsewhere and our hybrid mod for instance brings us down to 19 point 8 5 Celsius delta T from 59.4 on the reference cooler which uses just a vapor chamber and blower fan that's a reduction of 40 C for the load temperature as for idle temperatures those are a little lower than the 1080 for a few reasons if it confuses you one the die size of the Titan XP is 471 millimeters squared on the GPU 102 chip whereas the GP 104 trip is 314 millimeters squared this extra service area on GP 102 does actually help dissipate heat in a substantial way and then for liquid testing we also improved our implementation by keeping the base plate on the Titan X hybrid not done for the 1080 hybrid keep in mind also that these results are for the out of box product so there's not even overclocking and we've already dropped the thermals by 4 TC you can learn more about the endurance performance and other thermal tests in the article links below there are a couple of AIB partner card Titan X's out there that we don't have aces got one EVGA is making a few but this is a quick look at what the reference card offers we tested GTA 5 at 4k with very high in ultra settings but threw in a 1080p test just to demonstrate a point at 1080p were clearly hitting a CPU bottleneck and other component bottlenecks that's limiting GPU performance Titan XP is operating at 136 FPS average with 95 and 85 FPS 1% 0.1% Lewis perspectively which is trailed just barely by the GTX 1080 suite that we've got on the bench if you've got plans to buy either device between the two are comparing here it's probably worthwhile to invest in a higher resolution to screen just because really you shouldn't be playing 1080 with these cards that point made let's move on to 4k test the gtx titan x is outclassed by sli gtx 1070 s in this benchmark which jointly post a 79 FPS average against the titan x is 73 FPS average the single titan x as is often the case with the multi-gpu configurations outputs better frame times than the sli cards and even still the performance metrics are high enough on each device to be more or less identical with regard to use a perception of framerate throughput the difference between the configurations is about 8% just for reference and the GT X 1080 a IV partner cards meanwhile operate at 59 FPS average or there abouts with a gap of approximately 23% from the Titan XP below these the crossfire rx 480 is rest at 58 FPS average with a GTX 1080 Fe at 56 FPS average we tested doom with both OpenGL and Vulcan the latter of which is presented as an average and comparative charts let's start with just the OpenGL results at 1440p with ultra settings the Titan XP is posting an average FPS of 138 coupled with nearly 100 FPS 1% lows and about 89 fps 0.1% lows the Gigabyte GT X 1080 extreme water forest card that we reviewed recently is next in line and that's at 128 FPS average I'm similar lows it's not until we get to the 1080 EFI that there's a reasonable gap created almost entirely by the clock rate difference between all the cards where the 1080 Fe pushes 109 FPS average for Vulcan at 1440p the comparison shows an FPS output of 155 average for the Titan XP and that's followed by a gtx 1080 at about 128 FPS average that's performance difference of roughly 21% or 35 percent for the EFI variant and we need to tax the cards a little harder to show any visible degradation and performance so we're moving on to 4k with OpenGL only we've only got a few cards present on the bench for doom testing and the GTX Titan XP pushes an average FPS of 81 with lows north of 60 fps the GTX 1080 reference card is performing at 60 FPS average with 51 FPS 1% lows and 49 fps 0.1% low metrics Volken posts the Titan XP and DT X 1080 at roughly the same perform output since we're becoming bound by the resolution more than anything moving on to Mirror's Edge catalyst at 1440p stock tighten XP performance runs at approximately 111 FPS average with low frame rates reasonably timed to the average and constantly above 60fps the gigabyte GT X 1080 extreme water forest card along with all the other gtx 980 is rests at 95 FPS average and the reference 1080 is at 89 or about 24% slower than Titan XP moving to 4k the Titan X Pascal card is able to sustain high quality settings at 3840 by 2160 with an FPS of 60.3 FPS average about 4 to 5 ahead of the liquid-cooled 1080 GPUs and 5 FPS ahead of SLI GTX 10 70s the Seahawk and 1080 gaming X both run at around 51 FPS average with a 1070 gaming X way down at 40.6 7 average and 30 fps lows for more charts including Metro last light and Mordor in a couple of other games hit the link the description below for now let's move on to overclocking this is our overclocked stepping table with the GTX Titan XP card with maxed out power target and no core offset if you look closely in the top few rows the average clock rate operates at about a hundred megahertz higher than stock with a 100% target but we're still thermally limited regardless the maximum stable overclock finalized at around 1911 megahertz average frequency with a 175 megahertz offset to core and 450 offset to memory the peak clock was 1920 3.5 megahertz briefly anyway and this was with a 3500 rpm fan speed so noise levels are getting a bit more significant the liquid cooled variant for the curious was able to sustain a maximum overclock of 2012 megahertz where 1974 megahertz average and here's a quick look at overclocking performance we're seeing fairly substantial gains in some titles nearing 10 FPS more in GTA 5 and Mirror's Edge catalyst just to sort of reiterate our hybrid research content for the Titan XP this card and video is technically operating within spec because the spec says 15 31 megahertz it's often boosting to 1700 plus in gaming but the thin is again the spec could be higher and it doesn't retuning the GPU or using a different GP 100 whatever processor it just requires a better cooler putting on this reference cooler although they say it's high quality and really it's not bad as far as reference coolers go but putting it on this card seems sort of wasteful because you can get an extra 3 point 5 to 5 percent performance out of it just by using a better cooled card and that can be done with liquid or it could be done with air and the thing is because of the Titan X is sort of an Nvidia exclusive model it's really difficult to get AIB partner cards there aren't many of them I know EB J's got a hybrid model they're making or have made and there might be a couple others in the works but there aren't a lot of them so that means the most common model will be the reference Titan XP and that's just it's basically again a 5 percent performance swing just for using a better cooler so that's not something I was too happy about you could sort of bypass that and I'm sure some folks would argue that you could run the vrm fan at 100% and you'd get that extra bit of performance but that's really loud and it's just not worth it the Titan XP is still priced north of $1,000 for the most part with the GT X 1080 resting closer to 700 these days and it's absolute best performing scenarios the Titan XP is able to outperform the 1080 EFI by roughly 30% again best case scenarios and in the best case also post gains over a B partner 1080 s upwards of about 25% but we've got to keep the bigger picture in mind a GTX 1080 is already capable of running almost every game we've tested at 4k with roughly 60 FPS frame rates at a minimum in some cases and for most enthusiasts at the high end we'd wager that's enough and extra $300 doesn't really gain tangible frame rate improvement at this point since we're already so high at fps output up 1440p and in some 4 case scenarios though not all now that's not always true the Titan XP does have a few specific games where its performance gains are substantial but for the most part the GTX 1080 makes more sense as a top-of-the-line gaming card and is better priced for the sort of average enthusiast user Titan XP it may make more sense for rendering cuda accelerated applications but we're still waiting on more those to support Pascal architecture before really diving into testing that some things like blender have only just started adding support for Pascal so it's still a little ways off in terms of our test suite for games though the 1080 is pretty good as a top-of-the-line card I don't really know that there's a needs you go to the Titan XP unless you've got some really specific use case in which case you probably know if you already need it or not one last thing to throw in here is the name so if we talk about this with the gtx 1060 it's got ten percent fewer SMS half the vram and it's called a 1063 gigabyte but there's a 1066 gigabyte it's got more as Hatton's twice the ram i can kind of get over the vram difference but the sm change alone should be enough to issue a kind of rebrand of some kind of rebadge Titan XP is not the same problem because the spec there's one spec there's one SKU it's just Titan X is the name I've been calling it XP or Titan X Pascal this whole time that's because the Titan X mm which used to be called the Titan X was the Maxwell card and if you go look anywhere online you type in Titan X on Newegg almost all of the results are going to be for Maxwell cards if not all of them and they're priced similarly so it'd be pretty easy to accidentally buy an ace used Titan X Maxwell card which performs pretty differently a different architecture and that's something to look out for and it's something that really I wish Nvidia had enough foresight to to not do that it would literally adding one letter to the name would have fixed that issue Titan XP and it doesn't even sound bad it's cut the gaming sound to it with XP so if you are going to buy one of these which it's good card I'm not saying it's not a good card it's just it's very high performing it may be not necessary for a lot of people but if you're gonna buy one be careful when you look around on ebay Newegg things like that make sure you're not getting a maxwell card go directly to Nvidia's website if you want to be really safe because that's where you'll definitely get a pass go on so that is all for this time is always patreon link or post your video if you like this type of coverage and want to help us with more and then subscribe for additional content coming out as a ways everyday for the most part links to the description below for more I'll see you all next time