Gigabyte GeForce GTX 780 Windforce 3X OC - Faster, Cooler, More Powerful

Meet the Gigabyte GeForce GTX 780 Windforce 3X OC

NVIDIA's latest flagship graphics card, the GK110-based GeForce GTX 780, impressed us in our reference card review, with performance very close to, and even exceeding, NVIDIA's GTX Titan on some benchmarks. How will a factory-overclocked, custom card fare? Let's find out.

Gigabyte's GeForce GTX 780 Windforce 3X OC is overclocked 91MHz at the core, raising core clock speeds from 863MHz to an impressive 954MHz, although memory remains clocked at the default 6008MHz DDR. Like the reference card, it features a 3GB frame buffer.

As its Windforce 3X name would suggest, the card sports a custom triple fan cooler comprising of three 80mm fans mounted onto a skeletonized fanshroud, and a full aluminum fin-stack that covers the voltage regulator and memory area, all connected to two 8mm and four 6mm thick heat pipes.  

The dual-slot cooler isn't much larger than the reference design, measuring 292 x 129 x 43mm. Like the reference design, it requires one 8-pin and one 6-pin Molex power connector. 

The Gigabyte GTX 780 comes with Gigabyte's OC Guru II software, which supports control for NVIDIA's GPU Boost 2.0 technology and also provides an easy way to tweak and monitor core clock, memory clock, fan speed, gpu voltage and memory voltage. Locally, the card comes with a 3-year warranty period and it has an SRP of just S$999. It will be quite interesting to see how this windy card performs.

But before we begin drilling down, here's how the Gigabyte GeForce GTX 780 Windforce 3X OC compares against its competition:

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Test Setup

For those who've been following our reviews, take note that we've replaced our old test rig with a brand new one for 2013. Here are the new specs we'll be running with:

• Intel Core i7-3960X (3.3GHz)
• ASUS P9X79 Pro (Intel X79 chipset) Motherboard
• 4 x 2GB DDR3-1600 G.Skill Ripjaws Memory
• Seagate 7200.10 200GB SATA hard drive (OS)
• Western Digital Caviar Black 7200 RPM 1TB SATA hard drive (Benchmarks + Games)
• Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit

Here's the list of cards we'll be testing:

• Gigabyte GeForce GTX 780 Windforce 3X OC 3GB GDDR5 (ForceWare 320.18)
• NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780 3GB GDDR5 (ForceWare 320.18)
• NVIDIA GeForce GTX Titan 6GB GDDR5 (ForceWare 314.09)
• NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680 2GB GDDR5 (ForceWare 310.90)
• NVIDIA GeForce GTX 690 4GB GDDR5 (ForceWare 310.90)
• AMD Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition 3GB GDDR5 (AMD Catalyst 12.11 Beta) - OC BIOS

N.B.: There's a slight discrepancy in driver versions used across all the cards, but bear with us updating of benchmarks is an ongoing process, especially on our new test rig. Despite this, the differences shoudn't be alarming as they are fairly recent releases and still paint a reasonably accurate expectation of where the new card stands among the competition.

Benchmarks

For this review, we naturally expect the Gigabyte GTX 780 to score better than the reference design thanks to its factory overclock. As such, we will be paying more attention to its overclocking potential, temperature and power consumption. For this, we've chosen to streamline our results reporting to a very select set of benchmarks as outlined below. For a full set of benchmark and comparison results for the stock GTX 780 you may refer to our original review.

• Futuremark 3DMark 11
• Crysis 3
• Overclocking (Futuremark 3DMark 11)
• Temperature
• Power Consumption

3DMark 11

As always, we start with 3DMark 11, a synthetic benchmark designed to test a GPU's performance at various aspects of DirectX 11 such as tessellation and DirectCompute. The Gigabyte GTX 780 showed a pretty decent performance increase here, of about 5-6%, leaving it just 4% short of the GTX Titan's scores.   

Crysis 3

For an idea of in-game performance, we chose Crysis 3, the toughest game in our benchmark set due to its extreme amounts of tessellation, per-pixel per-object motion blur, Bokeh Depth of Field, displacement mapping, particle and volumetric lighting and fog shadows.

The Gigabyte GTX 780 was very impressive, showing a much higher performance gain here, scoring about 10-15% better across all settings and resolutions. 

Overclocking

As with the reference GTX 780, overclocking on the Gigabyte GTX 780 was fairly easy and we were able to raise core clock speeds to 1055MHZ, slightly less than the reference card. Compared to the reference card, we suffered no performance degradation when raising memory clock speeds, and settled on a stable memory clock of 6600MHz DDR. This is probably the result of the better cooling system that allowed the card to perform better and the results do show.

For our efforts, we were able to squeeze an extra 15% performance out of the card, which put it just 2.5% shy of our maximum overclocked GTX Titan - Impressive!

Temperature

The Gigabyte GTX 780's Windforce 3X cooler proved extremely effective, keeping temperatures a full 10 degrees cooler than the reference design. This will be particularly notable for anyone wishing to adjust the GPU Boost 2.0 temperature threshold on the card to obtain even higher boost clock speeds.

The triple fans on the Gigabyte GTX 780 were also fairly quiet, even when ramped up to more than 80% fan speed.

Power Consumption

Despite its triple fan setup, power consumption on the Gigabyte GTX 780 was quite reasonable, running just 9 watts higher than the reference design at load.

Updated on 9pm, 28th May: We published the review at 2pm on the same day, but we didn't get confirmation of the card's pricing till later in the day. As such we've updated the final paragraph to factor in it's SRP and updated the value quotient of the card's ratings.

Conclusion 

Gigabyte has done a superb job improving on an already impressive design with its custom GeForce GTX 780. It's rare to see a custom card perform so well in every category but this card manages to do just that, boasting a generous factory overclock and decent performance gain straight out of the box, plenty of overclocking overhead for enthusiasts to tweak to their heart's content, and a very effective custom cooler that manages to keep temperatures low without excessive fan noise. 

If you've been thinking about purchasing NVIDIA's GeForce GTX Titan, it's worth noting that there are no custom card variants of that card available (all add-in-board partner models use the reference design), and while the Titan has more raw firepower, with a little overclocking, the Gigabyte GTX 780 can easily surpass a reference Titan. In fact, its maximum overclock scores put it very close to the scores of a maximum overclocked Titan. As such, unless you really need the 6GB memory buffer the Titan provides (only really required for the massive resolutions of three-way or higher multiple monitor setups) we would definitely recommend saving some money and opting for the Gigabyte GTX 780 instead.

All things considered, the Gigabyte GTX 780 Windforce 3X OC provides a sizeable upgrade, both in terms of raw performance and cooler performance, over the reference design that you would expect it to be well worth the extra premium it may command. As it turns out, its suggested retail price is just S$999, which is somewhat 'more affordable' than expected. Although it remains to be seen how the other custom cards will fare, but for now, the Gigabyte GeForce GTX 780 Windforce 3X OC is the one to beat and we think it's going to hold the pole position for sometime to come.

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