Nvidia's Titan V Graphics Card : $3,000 buys you 'most powerful PC GPU ever'

Whenever Nvidia releases a new high-end graphics card you expect the high price attached to it. $1,000 cards are not uncommon, but Nvidia's latest is called the Titan V and it costs $2,999. In return for a ridiculous amount of cash, Nvidia promises you'll be getting "the most powerful graphics card ever created for the PC."

Before deciding not to buy a GeForce GTX 1080Ti or Titan XP for your gaming rig and spend triple the cash on a Titan V instead, keep in mind this is not a card aimed at gaming. Sure, you can stick it in your gaming rig and enjoy fantastic performance, but the Titan V is built using Nvidia's new GPU architecture called Volta. It's therefore a card designed first and foremost "to bring AI to every industry."

The Titan V includes six graphics processing clusters, 80 streaming multiprocessors, 5,120 CUDA cores, and 320 texture units. The card's base clock speed is set at 1,200MHz with a Boost Clock of 1,455MHz coupled with 12GB of HBM2 RAM running at 850MHz. That translates to 652.8GB/s of memory bandwidth, 110 teraflops of horsepower, and a 384 GigaTexels/sec texture rate. To power the card you'll need at least a 600 Watt power supply and sufficient cooling to deal with the thermal threshold of 91 degrees Celsius. Nvidia boasts that the Titan V enjoys double the energy efficiency of the Pascal architecture design meaning more performance at the same power levels.

As Extremetech points out, the Titan V is a slightly trimmed down Tesla V100, which was introduced earlier this year for $10,000 and aimed squarely at the supercomputing and HPC markets. So think of the Titan V as doing the same job, but Nvidia aimed it at a much larger audience by offering it for sale like any other graphics card.

If your focus is scientific simulation, neural networks, deep learning, or general high-performance artificial intelligence work, then the Titan V is certainly worth a look. However, if you're planning to build a new gaming rig I'd suggest focusing on the Pascal architecture and high-end GeForce GTX 1080Ti cards and save yourself $2,000 to put towards other components. Or if you really want to spend more, check out the Titan XP, which still only costs half the price of a Titan V.