So, Nvidia has finally launched their much awaited $3,000 graphics card which isn’t quite good enough for professional applications (no professional drivers, like Quadro) and is too expensive for 99.99% of gamers to ever consider as a GPU. The Titan Z was originally announced at Nvidia’s GTC 2014 back in March and there were rumors it was supposed to drop earlier this month but got delayed. Either way, the card is now available and if you’re willing to pay twice the price of an AMD Radeon R9 295X2, which isn’t really much slower, then you can buy it right now from multiple online etailers and system builders.

The Titan Z is clearly Nvidia’s response to the R9 295X2 which we reviewed last month, but Nvidia some how justifies charging double the price because it is a combination of two of Nvidia’s fastest GTX Titan GPUs. Even though they did this, they ended up clocking these two GPUs much lower than if you went out and bought a GTX Titan on its own. Yes, it does have 12 GB of GDDR5, but the reality is that you don’t need 12 GB of GDDR5 in order to drive a single 4K display and a single GTX Titan Z isn’t going to be enough to drive three 4K displays and actually game on them at decent FPS. So, in reality, you’ll need two GTX Titan Z’s in order to be able to drive three 4K displays anyways, which is going to be incredibly hot and expensive since it’ll end up costing you $6,000 for the GPUs alone when you could spend $4,000 and probably get better performance.

The GTX Titan Z’s GPUs shown bare, compliments of Digital Storm

The GTX Titan Z is Nvidia’s attempt to one up AMD, but the problem is that because it is air cooled they are forced to dial down the thermals of the card and its power consumption. AMD’s solution was to fully watercool their card, which they did get some criticism for having to do, but ultimately the card runs very cool and very quietly for being a dual GPU monster. In fact, Nvidia clocked their GPUs downward quite a bit because a GTX Titan Black, which is comparable to the GPUs onboard this card is clocked at 889 MHz base clock and 980 MHz boost clock. Meanwhile, the GTX Titan Z’s GPUs clock in at a much slower 705 and 876 MHz base and boost clock, making it fundamentally a lot slower as well. Also, according to Digital Storm’s review (the only one on the internet at launch is from a system builder??) the Titan Z isn’t really much faster than AMD’s R9 295X2 and only barely beats it in a few games.

So, basically, with the GTX Titan Z you’re paying double what AMD charges for the R9 295X2 for barely better (or worse) performance and a downclocked card (while AMD actually overclocked the 295×2 compared to the 290X). And not just that, you’re simply better served if you just buy GTX Titan Black GPUs because they are fully unlocked GPUs and they consistently outperform the GTX Titan Z by a pretty wide margin (because of the clocks).

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We were a bit surprised to see an announcement on Techpowerup! that ASUS had launched their GTX Titan Z without any hoopla from Nvidia or any of their other board partners. So, it comes as little surprise that the article itself has since been pulled and that any and all mentions of ASUS’ GTX Titan Z have disappeared. But of course, the damage has already been done and Pandora’s box has been opened. However, there isn’t that much about this card that is really a mystery.

The GTX Titan Z is expected to be a dual Titan graphics card, air cooled, that enables some of the best dual precision compute performance on earth while still delivering an incredible gaming experience, all while doing it with only one graphics card. This is possible because of the dual GPUs and 12 GB of RAM, which in theory would make the Titan Z a possibly better single card solution for driving three 4K monitors simultaneously. Obviously, based on our findings with the AMD R9 295X2, the likelihood of driving all three of those 4K monitors while gaming is out of the question, but driving a single 4K monitor is very likely possible if not encouraged. What’s more interesting is that Nvidia told us the price of the GTX Titan Z before we actually knew anything else about the card and as a result, it costs as much as two of AMD’s latest high-end GPU, the R9 295X2 at $3,000 a pop.

ASUS GTX Titan Z

Based on what we saw from Techpowerup, the ASUS card will have its own real-time graphics tuning utility called GPU Tweak to allow on-the-fly adjustments, even though I don’t know many people that need to make on-the-fly adjustments to a $3,000 card. Remember, this isn’t quite a professional card, but it also isn’t quite a gaming card since it is $3,000 and that takes it out of the reach of about 99.99% of gamers. It will also have each GPU running at a base clock of  705 MHz and a boost clock of 876 MHz, meaning that this card is significantly slower per GPU than its single GPU counterparts, which isn’t necessarily unexpected considering the TDP of each GPU. With both GPUs and memory combined, this card will have a total of 12 GB of GDDR5 memory and 5760 CUDA cores, which are what this card is designed to deliver, lots of memory and lots of cores.

According to the Techpowerup! article this GPU is supposed to be available worldwide on April 29th, yesterday. However, we’re hearing that there is a slight delay with this card and that date has been pushed back to May 8th, essentially a week away from tomorrow. Which may explain why ASUS had Techpowerup pull the article and why there is no news about it, Techpowerup may have just not gotten the memo.

SPECIFICATIONS: GTXTITANZ-12GD5

Graphics Engine: NVIDIA GeForce GTX TITAN Z
Bus Standard: PCI Express 3.0
OpenGL: OpenGL 4.4
Video Memory: 12 GB GDDR5
GPU Boost Clock: 876 MHz
GPU Base Clock: 705 MHz
CUDA Cores: 5760
Memory Clock: 7000 MHz
Memory Interface: 768 bit
Output: 1 x Native DVI-I, 1 x Native DVI-D,1 x Native HDMI, 1 x Native DisplayPort 1.2

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