NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780 3GB Review: Rolling Over The Competition

Updated: May 23, 2013

Aesthetics and Design

The reference card we received from NVIDIA for testing looks an awful lot like the GeForce GTX Titan we reviewed awhile back, as they both features the same cooling apparatus and color scheme which to the naked eye, makes the two extremely hard to tell apart. That is, until you see the the GTX 780 nomenclature which is clearly etched into the face of the card and ultimately let’s you know this is an entirely different beast. Although many companies nowadays are using open-air style coolers, NVIDIA has moved into an entirely new direction all together, using their own reference based design that does indeed improve upon previous generation designs quite a bit.

You can see in the pictures that the card is completely encased on the topside and then uses a single fan to move air across both the GPU and the components, then dissipates the hot air out of the rear I/O and ultimately out of the system. I personally would have liked to have seen the entire card feature an all black design, almost like a reverse color scheme with the fan shroud silver, but that’s personal preference and regardless it is still a very sharp design.

Here is a picture of the topside of the silicon for the GeForce GTX 780 as well as a shot of the back showing a solid black PCB and all of the components that make up the basic aspects of the card. One thing good about the reference-designed card though is that most after market-cooling solutions be it air or liquid usually are based around NVIDIA’s basic design.

It would have been really cool if NVIDIA shielded the PCB on the backside to go along with their new cooling, but I guess you cannot get everything every time.