Maxwell Houses Eco Ecstacies.

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On forums, things like this were happening.

Fanboy No.1. The R9 290X trashes your 780 Ti. It’s better value, has an extra gig of RAM and is faster at 4K, especially in crossfire, plus you can get two for the price of one Titan Black.

Fanboy No.2. The Titan Black was never intended to compete with the R9s. Nvidia’s new drivers drastically improve the 780 Ti. It’s just as good at 4K. All those reviews have the R9 290 in “Uber mode” which cranks up the fan and boosts the core speed automatically, its basically a head start. The 780 Ti over-clocks like a champ, runs much cooler and consumes way less power, about 50w per card under load. If you clocked and cooled it in line with a 290x, it would destroy it, single v single or SLI v crossfire, would’t matter.

Fanboy No.1 But it’s 100 dollars dearer and no quicker overall, if the noise bothers you just get card with a non-reference cooler or water cool a stock one with the cash you’ve saved, then you could ramp up the core and memory even further.

Fanboy No.1 Please, then you’d have a card that draws around 350W and tops 95C the entire time, and think of two in crossfire! How about this, buy a non-standard 780Ti or or water-cool a stock one, spend a bit more up front but have a card that is quieter, cooler, faster by default, has more clocking headroom and recoup the extra investment by saving those watts.

Fanboy No.3. The Titan-Z is the best card on the planet, it doesn’t need native water cooling, won’t cause lifts in your block to stall, has more memory, ultimate double precision power and can be over-clocked far higher than the R9 295×2.

Fanboy No.4. C’mon, its twice the price, when it’s over-clocked it’s still slower and sucks just as many watts. Who cares about the water cooling?Spend the money you’ve saved on a bigger case. No gamer needs or wants double precision and 12 gigs of ram? What game is gonna max that out? 8 gigs is plenty.

Fanboy no.3. But It’s watercooled out of the box, that’s cheating, if you put a Titan-Z under water it would best a 295 across the board.

Fanboy No.4. Errr. Yeah, you’ve just spent $2500 on a graphics card that’s slower than one you can buy for over $1000 less and what’s your first bright idea…spend another $100 on cooling it. Your call pal.

And so, with both Green Eyes and Red Beard still furiously flogging what wise bards of technology were declaring a deceased manufacturing process, it was time for another quantum leap, not only in speed, but eco-elegance and there was where Maestro Maxwell’s symphony sung its sweetest.

Meet the The GM204

Right, that’s enough of the silly similes, time I need a table treat to attend to our sanity.

To any and all with an acute aversion to tables, let’s get the stats out of the way, for if there’s one thing our fresh roasted duo of débutantes proves, its that no isolated figure has any meaningful bearing on synthetic or organic performance, at low or high resolution, and with or without and eyeful of sugar and spice. Indeed, it was these very characters that search for such that elusive magic number would yield not a hint of wisdom.

Note the figures for texture units, render output processors and stream/shader processors. The first directly dictates texture fill rates, the while the third primarily governs floating point proficiency. But when seeking a silky, satisfying, responsive and engaging session of Battlefield brutality, which matters the most? Is it any of them?

Regard our new arrivals, the 980 and the 970…fancy that…less texture units than the Titan Black, R9 290X and 780Ti, fewer stream processors than all three and hence, lower texture fill rates and floating point proficiency. What about the memory bus? The girth of which almost every shrewd statistician declares a pivotal factor in bids for eye candy ecstasies? Look again, the 980 and 970, 256bits? A third slimmer than the Titan Black and 780Ti, half that of the R9 290x and only equalling the two year old GTX 680.

Let’s try again, memory bandwidth? Wasn’t that once all the range? Greater bandwidth, lesser stutter? Examine our inductees once more, just 224GB/s, lower than their three former flagships. Transistors? Yet another undercut, by 1 and 1.8 billion relative to the Hawaii and GK110. And die size? Indeed, you didn’t misread, just 398mm, almost 10% leaner than the islander and 30% easier on the wafer than a Kepler thoroughbred. The RAM itself?, 4GB, more than its spiritual elder, level with the Ruby Devil but below the Titan Black.

Most remarkable of all was the power savings and speed bonuses afforded by these extensive cuts. Base and boost core frequencies of 1050 and 1126mhz for the GTX 970 and of 1178 and 1126,mhz for the 980 and what about those extraordinary TDPs? 148 and 165 watts and all from a GPU whose conception was supposedly hampered by an ageing production process, definitive proof of the Moore’s law limit?

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