Introduction :
The GTX 780 is nvidia's second enthusiast grade GPU after the Titan. Its based on the same silicon (GK1100) but is slightly cut down to 2304 shader units (compared to the Titan with 2688). Zotac has fitted this card with a huge cooler and overclocked it to cut down this gap between the two. So lets take a closer look at the card and its performance.
Package and Unboxing :
The card comes in a fairly large box and inside, the card is well secured in a foam casing. The bundle is somewhat minimal. You get all the essentials, two power adapters, a driver disc, DVI to VGA adapter and coupon to download the splinter cell series of games.
Closer Look :
Taking a closer look at the card itself, you notice the dual slot custom triple fan cooler that Zotac have used with this card.
There are various display options with this card. You get 2 DVI ports, a display port and an HDMI port. This configuration is pretty standard these days and should be enough for your needs. If you still use VGA, then you can use the included VGA adapter.
The card uses 1 8pin and 1 6pin power connector, so make sure your PSU supports that configuration.
Testing Methodology :
We tried to keep all tests as fair as possible. In games, whenever possible, we tried using in game benchmarks. But not all games have that, so we had to recreate the same scene manually. Hence, the results might not be perfect, but they should give you a fairly good idea. These scenes might not be the most graphics intensive (no explosions, etc) as they are much harder to reproduce.
To remove any possibility of bottlenecks, we have overclocked our 2500k to 4.5GHz and the RAM is overclocked as well. Below are the detailed test bench specifications :
Processor : Intel Core i5 2500k (Overclocked to 4.5GHz)
Motherboard : ASRock Z77E-ITX Motherboard
RAM : 8GB DDR3 RAM (@ 2133MHz ,10-10-10-26-1T) Samsung 30nm Green RAM
Graphics Card : Zotac GTX 780 AMP! (Driver Version : 332.1)
PSU : Corsair 550VX
Cooling : SVG Tech HOC 40
Casing : Bitfenix Prodigy
Here is the list of games that we have used for the review:
Battlefield 3
Crysis 2 (with HD texture pack)
Formula One 2012
Formula One 2013
Mafia 2
Hitman Absolution
GRID 2
Starcraft 2
Overclocking :
So before we look at the benchmark results, lets see how this card overclocks. In all the benchmarks, the overclocked results have been included so you can see what kind of real world gains are seen. For overclocking, I used the EVGA Precision X utility. I cranked up the power limit to 105%, which was the maximum allowed, to obtain these results. I left all other settings to auto.
The overclocking I could achieve with this card was impressive. I could manage an extra 161MHz on the core clock and about 390MHz on the memory, which I am sure can be improved with a little more tweaking.
With these settings, I got about 10% performance gains in the Hitman Absolution benchmark. Pretty neat for something that's free !
Temperatures and Noise :
Now lets put the cooler to test. At idle the fans are almost inaudible and keep the temperatures really low at around 36C (ambient is around 28C). Under load these temperatures rose to 64C and when overclocked, temperatures were around the 66C mark. Overall very good temperatures , specially considering the noise was almost none in all the tests.
Battlefield 3 :
Crysis 2 :
Seems like there was some pretty heavy CPU bottleneck in this game. Performance was much much better than any other cards that I tested before. The benchmark too completed much faster than any other !
Starcraft 2 :
Mafia 2 :
Hitman Absolution :
F1 2012:
F1 2013:
GRID 2:
The Verdict :
I am mighty impressed by this card. Zotac have pretty much done everything right here. The card performs like a champ, has a very good overclocking potential and runs very cool and quiet as well. The bundle ain't its strength, but the addition of a few games is still pretty good. Overall, would recommend this card for those enthusiasts who demand such performance or those gamers who want to use it for high resolution (1440p+ or multi monitor) or 3D gaming. If you are just going to game at 1080p, this might be an overkill (but there are games like titanfall that might prove me wrong!). At a price of around Rs46,500 its not everyone's cup-a-tea, I will give this a 9.5/10 .
The GTX 780 is nvidia's second enthusiast grade GPU after the Titan. Its based on the same silicon (GK1100) but is slightly cut down to 2304 shader units (compared to the Titan with 2688). Zotac has fitted this card with a huge cooler and overclocked it to cut down this gap between the two. So lets take a closer look at the card and its performance.
Package and Unboxing :
The card comes in a fairly large box and inside, the card is well secured in a foam casing. The bundle is somewhat minimal. You get all the essentials, two power adapters, a driver disc, DVI to VGA adapter and coupon to download the splinter cell series of games.
Closer Look :
Taking a closer look at the card itself, you notice the dual slot custom triple fan cooler that Zotac have used with this card.
There are various display options with this card. You get 2 DVI ports, a display port and an HDMI port. This configuration is pretty standard these days and should be enough for your needs. If you still use VGA, then you can use the included VGA adapter.
The card uses 1 8pin and 1 6pin power connector, so make sure your PSU supports that configuration.
Testing Methodology :
We tried to keep all tests as fair as possible. In games, whenever possible, we tried using in game benchmarks. But not all games have that, so we had to recreate the same scene manually. Hence, the results might not be perfect, but they should give you a fairly good idea. These scenes might not be the most graphics intensive (no explosions, etc) as they are much harder to reproduce.
To remove any possibility of bottlenecks, we have overclocked our 2500k to 4.5GHz and the RAM is overclocked as well. Below are the detailed test bench specifications :
Processor : Intel Core i5 2500k (Overclocked to 4.5GHz)
Motherboard : ASRock Z77E-ITX Motherboard
RAM : 8GB DDR3 RAM (@ 2133MHz ,10-10-10-26-1T) Samsung 30nm Green RAM
Graphics Card : Zotac GTX 780 AMP! (Driver Version : 332.1)
PSU : Corsair 550VX
Cooling : SVG Tech HOC 40
Casing : Bitfenix Prodigy
Here is the list of games that we have used for the review:
Battlefield 3
Crysis 2 (with HD texture pack)
Formula One 2012
Formula One 2013
Mafia 2
Hitman Absolution
GRID 2
Starcraft 2
Overclocking :
So before we look at the benchmark results, lets see how this card overclocks. In all the benchmarks, the overclocked results have been included so you can see what kind of real world gains are seen. For overclocking, I used the EVGA Precision X utility. I cranked up the power limit to 105%, which was the maximum allowed, to obtain these results. I left all other settings to auto.
The overclocking I could achieve with this card was impressive. I could manage an extra 161MHz on the core clock and about 390MHz on the memory, which I am sure can be improved with a little more tweaking.
With these settings, I got about 10% performance gains in the Hitman Absolution benchmark. Pretty neat for something that's free !
Temperatures and Noise :
Now lets put the cooler to test. At idle the fans are almost inaudible and keep the temperatures really low at around 36C (ambient is around 28C). Under load these temperatures rose to 64C and when overclocked, temperatures were around the 66C mark. Overall very good temperatures , specially considering the noise was almost none in all the tests.
Battlefield 3 :
Crysis 2 :
Seems like there was some pretty heavy CPU bottleneck in this game. Performance was much much better than any other cards that I tested before. The benchmark too completed much faster than any other !
Starcraft 2 :
Mafia 2 :
Hitman Absolution :
F1 2012:
F1 2013:
GRID 2:
The Verdict :
I am mighty impressed by this card. Zotac have pretty much done everything right here. The card performs like a champ, has a very good overclocking potential and runs very cool and quiet as well. The bundle ain't its strength, but the addition of a few games is still pretty good. Overall, would recommend this card for those enthusiasts who demand such performance or those gamers who want to use it for high resolution (1440p+ or multi monitor) or 3D gaming. If you are just going to game at 1080p, this might be an overkill (but there are games like titanfall that might prove me wrong!). At a price of around Rs46,500 its not everyone's cup-a-tea, I will give this a 9.5/10 .
