NVIDIA's reasoning behind the lack of a backplate is apparently airflow in SLI.
They had that cut-out you could remove on the 980's backplate but I suppose their testing indicated that it was inadequate.
I would much rather that they had included a solid backplate and just had you remove it entirely or space them out if you're planning on using SLI.
Do they really expect that many people to be running double, triple, or quad Titan X's?
Not as much of a fan of the overall look of this one compared to the previous reference designs either. Personally I prefer a silver card, but I think the black would look a lot better if it didn't have those silver accents. Just looks like they wanted to reuse existing parts so that they only needed to have a custom shroud for the Titan X's cooler.
I think it's interesting that few sites seem to have commented on the fact that the Titan X is now just a gaming card.
Previously there was some justification for the Titan/Titan Black's position on the market as entry-level workstation GPUs which had much better compute performance than the GeForce cards, though they lacked many of the features (and extreme cost) of the Quadros. If you think the Titan X is expensive, you should see what the new M6000 costs!
But the Titan X has the same 1/32 FP32 compute performance of all the Maxwell gaming parts rather than the 1/3 FP32 performance of the previous Titans. It's slower than a 580 for double-precision work!
And $999 (the same price as all the previous Titans) is an awful lot for something which is purely a gaming card - especially when a $699 980 Ti is already rumoured to be on the way, which should just be a Titan with half the VRAM - and 6GB is plenty for most games right now.
As for Titan X vs 980 SLI: I would choose the Titan X even if performance is not quite the same.
With a pair of 980's in SLI, you only have 4GB VRAM available, and you are at the mercy of driver support for SLI in the games you want to play.
Even if SLI is supported, you have additional input lag and potential frame pacing issues introduced with an SLI setup compared to a single card.
Current games seem capable of pushing VRAM usage beyond 4GB, and who knows what the future brings. VRAM usage just seems to keep going up and up. I would prefer to have too much than not enough, even if 12GB does seem a bit crazy right now.
It wasn't that long ago that 2/3/4GB VRAM seemed crazy.
They had that cut-out you could remove on the 980's backplate but I suppose their testing indicated that it was inadequate.
I would much rather that they had included a solid backplate and just had you remove it entirely or space them out if you're planning on using SLI.
Do they really expect that many people to be running double, triple, or quad Titan X's?
Not as much of a fan of the overall look of this one compared to the previous reference designs either. Personally I prefer a silver card, but I think the black would look a lot better if it didn't have those silver accents. Just looks like they wanted to reuse existing parts so that they only needed to have a custom shroud for the Titan X's cooler.
I think it's interesting that few sites seem to have commented on the fact that the Titan X is now just a gaming card.
Previously there was some justification for the Titan/Titan Black's position on the market as entry-level workstation GPUs which had much better compute performance than the GeForce cards, though they lacked many of the features (and extreme cost) of the Quadros. If you think the Titan X is expensive, you should see what the new M6000 costs!
But the Titan X has the same 1/32 FP32 compute performance of all the Maxwell gaming parts rather than the 1/3 FP32 performance of the previous Titans. It's slower than a 580 for double-precision work!
And $999 (the same price as all the previous Titans) is an awful lot for something which is purely a gaming card - especially when a $699 980 Ti is already rumoured to be on the way, which should just be a Titan with half the VRAM - and 6GB is plenty for most games right now.
As for Titan X vs 980 SLI: I would choose the Titan X even if performance is not quite the same.
With a pair of 980's in SLI, you only have 4GB VRAM available, and you are at the mercy of driver support for SLI in the games you want to play.
Even if SLI is supported, you have additional input lag and potential frame pacing issues introduced with an SLI setup compared to a single card.
Current games seem capable of pushing VRAM usage beyond 4GB, and who knows what the future brings. VRAM usage just seems to keep going up and up. I would prefer to have too much than not enough, even if 12GB does seem a bit crazy right now.
It wasn't that long ago that 2/3/4GB VRAM seemed crazy.
) everything is smooth on 1440p , totally worth the cost
