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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As promised, we’ve selected the winners for our Nvidia 5th Anniversary Giveaway. This giveaway was the second massive giveaway of our multi-week-long giveaway to commemorate our 5th anniversary as a site. It followed our Thermaltake and Titanfall giveaways. We had over 876 entries in the giveaway and we’ve selected the winners based on their comments, tweets, FB shares and Google+ +1’s. Some contestants did not follow the rules and attempted to leave multiple comments under the same user name or under different user names using different IP addresses. So, please, do not try to cheat the system. You end up cheating yourself out of a prize. In this case, one of you lost the chance to win an Nvidia SHIELD, so next time follow the rules and leave a comment, not comments. We’re happy to run these giveaways for our readers, but we also want to ensure that those winners are ones that have won the prize fair and square.

The winners of the contest are as follows:

GTX Titan:
Jake P

Nvidia SHIELD:
Jason Li

Nvidia Tegra Note 7 with Smartcover:
David (no last name, from the UK)
Mack Brown

Congratulations to the winners and we hope that you guys remember to claim your prizes within 24 hours at our giveaways at brightsideofnews dot com email address. Thank you all for participating and don’t forget that we’re going to have a TON more giveaways these coming weeks and that we’re only about half way through with our pile of hardware to give away…

Once again, thank you all for participating and good luck in our other giveaways!

The post BSN 5th Anniversary Nvidia Giveaway Winners Selected! appeared first on VR World.