Conclusion

Running the card at stock clocks shows, that when we equipped it with the EK-FC TITAN watercooler scores were on average 5.9 percent higher than with the aircooler. This is actually already a solid hint, that the card started to throttle with even the powerful NVIDIA aircooler, even at stock clocks. The smallest performance difference we found with Skyrim, where the watercooled card was only 2.18 percent quicker. On the other hand there is Metro Last Light where we see that the watercooled card is no less than 14.8 percent quicker.

Once we started overclocking the card, we noticed that 1150 MHz on the GPU and 1850 MHz on the memory were maximum stable clocks to run the card aircooled. In order to show there is quite some potential still slumbering in the GTX TITAN, when watercooled, we overclocked the card a little bit higher. In this case we ran it at 1185 MHz GPU clocks and 1850 MHz memory clocks. 

Let's discuss the results again now. In 3DMark Fire Strike Extreme we see the scores increase by 21.1 percent in case of aircooling OC and 22.8 percent when it comes to watercooling OC. This means there is a gap of 1.7 percent inbetween aircooling and watercooling, which apparently comes from the higher overclocking of the watercooled version. One value that was especially interesting at this point was Metro Last Light. In this game the watercooled and overclocked cards gains no less than 35.5 percent, whereas the aircooled and overclocked card "only" gains 24.3 percent.

On another note we had a closer look at temperatures. There is actually nothing much to say then the obvious. Even under full load and overclocked the watercooled card didn't get hotter than 42°C, whereas the aircooled version ran at 68°C.

We want to end this conclusion with a few brief thoughts. Should you really have the funds to buy a GTX TITAN graphics card, then we can definitely recommend to go for watercooling gear too. Watercooled you can run you system cooler and quieter and there is also a little more headroom to optimize frequencies. Other than that watercooling adds to the exclusivity of your system, which might definitely something you consider when buying an NVIDIA GeForce GTX TITAN graphics card.

Page 1 - Introduction	Page 9 - Call of Duty Black Ops 2
Page 2 - Test Setup	Page 10 - Sleeping Dogs
Page 3 - 3DMark Fire Strike	Page 11 - The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
Page 4 - Unigine Heaven 4.0	Page 12 - Metro: Last Light
Page 5 - BattleField 4	Page 13 - Power Consumption
Page 6 - BattleField 3	Page 14 - Temperatures
Page 7 - Bioshock Infinite	Page 15 - Index
Page 8 - Crysis 3	Page 16 - Conclusion