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Gigabyte GeForce GTX 780 GHz Edition Review

Published by Christian Ney on 09.11.13

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With the arrival of the new and more efficient B1 revision of the 28nm GK110 GPU, some Nvidia add-in-card (AIC) partners, like Gigabyte, have decided to come up with a completely new SKU, while some will simply silently replace the old A1 revision. Gigabyte's new GTX 780 GHz Edition will not only feature the new GK110-300-B1 chip, but also bring a couple of other enhancements that should make it one of the best and among the fastest GTX 780 graphics cards on the market.

Presentation

Gigabyte is one of the first Nvidia add-in-card (AIC) partners that has decided to introduce a new custom GTX 780 graphics card that will use the new B1 revision of the GK110 chip. For its new graphics card, Gigabyte makes use of a custom PCB paired up with its own custom Windforce 3X 450W cooler. Since it used the new B1 revision of the GK110 chip, it was a simple decision to go for a high factory overclock. Gigabyte's new GTX 780 GHz Edition is practically the GTX 780 OC V2 on steroids, as Gigabyte used the new GPU revision, better memory chips and a full cover backplate.

There have been a lot of rumors regarding the Geforce GTX 780 GHz Edition and the new B1 revision of the GK110 GPU and it appears that AIC partners will simply change the GPU on-the-fly and only a handful of them will actually make a new SKU out of it. The GPU still packs the same 2304 CUDA cores, 192 TMUs and 48 ROPs and the only thing that is actually changed is the fact that this GPU allows much higher clocks. The B1 revision of the GK110 GPU is also a bit more efficient as you will see later in the review.

As you can see from the GPU-Z screenshot below, Gigabyte decided to use a quite high factory-overclock on the new GTX 780 GHz Edition. Actually this makes it the third fastest GTX 780 on the market. While the standard reference GTX 780 with GK110-300-A1 GPU is set to work at 863MHz for the base GPU and 902MHz for the GPU Boost clock, the Gigabyte GTX 780 GHz Edition works at quite high 1'020MHz for the base and 1'072MHz for the Boost GPU clock.

Unfortunately and despite the fact that it used different memory chips, 3GB of GDDR5 memory paired up with a 384-bit memory interface on the Gigabyte GTX 780 GHz Edition remained at reference 1'502MHz (6'008MHz effective).

While the typical Boost clock is set at 1'072MHz, the maximum Boost of 1'163MHz was achieved quite easily and the GTX 780 GHz Edition held that clock most of the load time due to a really good Windforce 3X 450W cooler as well as good TDP target (nVidia's Boost technology being power-based and not temperature-based on this card). The GPU Max. Boost clock only dropped in Furmark where the card was pushed too far.

Specifications

	Gigabyte GTX 780 GHz	Gigabyte GTX 780 OC V2	GeForce GTX 780
Chip	GK110-300-B1	GK110-300-A1	GK110-300-A1
Process	28 nm	28 nm	28 nm
Transistors	7.10 billion	7.10 billion	7.10 billion
GPU clock	1'020 MHz	954 MHz	863 MHz
GPU Boost clock	1'072 MHz	1'006 MHz	900 MHz
Memory GDDR5	3'072 MB	3'072 MB	3'072 MB
Memory clock	1'502 (6'008) MHz	1'502 (6'008) MHz	1'502 (6'008) MHz
Memory interface	384 Bit	384 Bit	384 Bit
Memory bandwidth	288'400 MB/s	288'400 MB/s	288'400 MB/s
Shader Cores	2'304 (12 SMX)	2'304 (12 SMX)	2'304 (12 SMX)
TMUs	192	192	192
ROPs	48	48	48
TDP	xxx Watt	>250 Watt	250 Watt
PCB Type	Custom Design	Custom Design	Reference Design
Lenght (PCB - Total)	26.9 - 28.8 cm	26.9 - 28.8 cm	27.0 - 27.0 cm
Height (PCB - Total)	11.0 - 12.9 cm	11.0 - 12.9 cm	11.0 - 11.0 cm
Slots	2	2	2
Cooler	WindForce 3X 450W	WindForce 3X 450W	NVIDIA Reference
Launch Price	$XXX	$XXX	$649