Just kidding! Today Nvidia announced the Titan Z – a dual GPU version of the Titan black edition. I.E. 2 lots of GK110 fully unlocked at 2880 cores per GPU and 2 lots of 6GB VRAM per GPU core. Yes Nvidia will say that’s 12GB on the card but remember that 12GB is only marketing as you don’t get to use the 12GB only 6GB because of how SLI works. Of course the real news is not the card itself but the price. Yes it’s $3000. That is not a typo it really is three thousand of your american dollars! Dr Evil would be proud, he also never understood April fool’s day.
First a history lesson…
Unlike AMD, Nvidia has made pretty horrible dual GPU cards since they released Fermi. Does anyone remember the GTX 590 that could be killed at stock volts and clocks? The 590 also suffered from an abysmal 1.5GB ofVRAM. The high end Nvidia setup of the time was the 580 3GB in tri or quad SLI. The 590 was there for marketing and an exercise in managing public relation failures.
The 690 though didn’t explode like the 590 but it did still suffer from only having 2GB of VRAM. Again it was underclocked compared to the 680, and for the high end a quad 680 4GB setup with improved OC ability was the way to go and available months before the 690. The 690 was such a waste that unless you had mITX you were going to be made fun of behind your back for not only trying but also failing at epeen. Then Titan launched and embarrassed anyone who bought a 690 for a second time.
Secondly – what does the Titan Z launch mean for us?
VRAM – Nvidia fixed the VRAM issue- now we have 6 glorious gigglebytes per GPU which is overkill for anything in the near future.
Compute – This is a Titan card which means it will have double-precision floating point compute enabled. This means that it is useful for compute.
Weak VRMs – Because it’s a Titan then Nvidia will design a weak VRM with little overclock headroom. It will most likely power throttle in a way that will make you wonder why you spent 3K on something that can’t hit 1GHz. In order to overclock you’ll need to flash a modded bios and watercool the card to keep those VRMs from suiciding.
Lower Clocks – Because Nvidia concern themselves with noise they try and keep the noise and therefore power low. This means this thing will run lower clocks at stock which means unless you are space and slot limited that again not only are multiple Titan Black Editions cheaper, but also faster!
High Prices – After returns from alt coin mining collapsed earlier this month we expected to see a return to the “normal” but yet still increased GPU prices of 2013. This card has proved that Nvidia are doubling down on riding your wallet hard. Having said that that GPU is marketed as a compute card it is not unfairly priced compared to the rather pricey Tesla and Quadro cards. However given that there is no cheaper 790 announced (yet at least) then Nvidia know that really they’ll still be fleecing some gamers who don’t know any better.
So who should buy this card?
Gamers – Almost no gamers should ever buy this card. The only exception to that is someone with a high end mITX rig who only has one slot and wants the best performance possible. This card will most likely be the top performing single GPU. The Ares 3 might give it a run for it’s money on some games though. The Ares 3 will amusingly most likely be *cheaper* even though it’s limited edition and usually considered rare/overpriced. The real question is if you can afford a $3000 GPU in your mITX rig then why not sell your mITX rig and buy an ATX rig with 2+ 780TI’s or Titan BEs?
Compute – as we’ve mentioned about twenty five times, two Titan Black Editions will win on compute for cost and speed. However this card enables compute users to put more GPU cores in per rig which *is* an advantage for some users. The shared componentry may also increase power efficiency.
Epeen – if you buy this for epeen you’re not even saying that you want the best rig money can buy – you’re saying you want the most expensive. It’s like buying a diamond encrusted iphone 4 when you could buy a normal iphone 5 for less money. At some point you get a reputation for having far more money than sense. There’s a difference between trying to have the best rig possible in the world and spending money unwisely. Don’t let Dr Evil persuade you otherwise.
The truth is that Nvidia know the only real market for this card is compute which is therefore how they’ve presented it and they’ll get away with the price because of it. However they still know that they can still fleece gamers which is why a cheap 790 wasn’t launched at the same time. It is also an indicator that Nvidia will push prices up again when maxwell launches properly, simply because this costs far more than two individual cards. And yes this is another product that Nvidia could have launched a long long time ago, but waited this long in order to pad out the wait until the high end Maxwell parts arrive. It also coincidentally arrived shortly before AMD’s dual GPU card.
One last thing before you plunk down that $3000 – this is exactly the same silicon that was supposed to replace the GTX580 back in Q1 of 2012, if it’s easy to plunk down $3000 for 2 year old tech, then well, you’re more flush than me!
