Pete J's Four way Titan X SLI review For a while now, I've always wanted to investigate using four way SLI before I give up on maintaining a state of the art rig: additionally, I regret not buying the original Titan at launch as a trio of them still laugh at anything the world has to offer even over two years on, The launch of the Titan X triggered my more certifiable side and I decided that the credit card needed punishing. I also had a backup plan in that if the fourth card was really not adding any noticeable improvements, I would replace the 780 in my brand new HTPC to turn it into a little UltraHD gaming monster - I need a GPU with HDMI 2.0 anyway. So, without further ado, the results of my weird obsessive need to find out the limits of any new hardware I buy... The rig Processor: i7 5930K @ 4.5GHz (1.35V) Motherboard: ASUS RAMPAGE V EXTREME Corsair 4X4GB Vengeance LPX Black @ 3000MHz 15-15-15-36-2T Boot drive: 500GB Samsung 850 EVO (SATA) Scratch drive: 250GB Samsung 850 EVO(SATA) Game/benchmark drive: 2X1TB Samsung 850 EVO in RAID0 (SATA) Storage drive: 2TB WD Caviar Green PSU: SuperFlower '8Pack Edition' 2000W Monitors: Asus PQ321QE (Main), Dell 3007WFP-HC (secondary) Audio: Onboard SupremeX with QPAD QH-1339 Mouse and keyboard: Logitech MK710 and MX3200 OS: Win 7 Ultimate x64 UPS: APC SMT3000I Note that although in the past I used to disable hyperthreading, I now have it activated as Intel seem to have stopped it hurting single thread performance. Additionally, the CPU overclock is stable enough to run Intel Burn Test for 25 loops on 'very high' (I don't have enough RAM to perform the maximum test) and survive 12 hours of large in-place FFTs in Prime95 for twelve hours on twelve threads. All SSDs have had 22% left unformatted. Although I do have screen calibration hardware and software, I left them uninstalled for testing. Choice of vendor Originally I wanted to have Asus cards based on the excellent experiences I've had with their products recently but at time of purchasing they had the longest lead time – something that became moot when all Titan Xs seemed to take a month to arrive! Looking through the available options at the time, the EVGA Superclocked editions caught my eye – for a comparatively small cost, a significant factory overclock came as standard. This was an absolute no-brainer for me. The standard GPU clock for a Titan X is 1000MHz (boost 1075MHz): an EVGA Titan X SC comes in at 1127 (boost 1216MHz). Initial impressions I’m not going to post any close-up shots as all the tech sites have pictures and they’ll be far superior compared to my shaky hand and camera phone. Suffice to say the Titan X looks like a beast. However, I have to admit the 780 cooler looks a bit more refined! Results Assume that for all tests that all in-game settings are at their maximum unless otherwise specified. Nvidia Control Panel wise, I only set performance to maximum rather than adaptive. Single and three way GTX 780(s) Nvidia's drivers have come on a hell of a long way since the introduction of UltraHD. Things are much more stable and it is now extremely rare for me to get the 'one side failing to initialise' error. However, it seems that it's still advisable to keep the UltraHD monitor turned off until Windows has booted to the log in screen, otherwise the system can hang on a not too infrequent basis. Scaling is still an issue however and with my current UltraHD monitor, I cannot upscale games from resolutions less than UltraHD, resulting in a window with black boarders on the top and sides. Anyway, I include the results below for the sake of it. The drivers used for 780 testing were 347.88. Needless to say, tri SLI has relatively poor scaling except for Hitman: Absolution Single GTX 780 Versus Titan X Note that for Titan X results, drivers 350.12 were used. Just Cause 2 was omitted as 32x antialiasing had been applied on the 780 results whereas only 8x antialiasing could be applied when using the Titan X(s). Look at that! An average 83% performance increase over a 780! Titan X scaling For these results, I decided to ignore maximums as they’re pretty much meaningless. Note that scaling is for the mean results. Batman: Arkham Origins – Nice, smooth behaviour. A fourth GPU doesn't add anything performance wise; rather, it hurts the minimums. Crysis – Framerates taken from the average of the fourth run of the GPU test: I had to manually note the average just as the benchmark ended due to the reporting tool always auto closing after benchmark completion. The results surprised me. In the past, anything beyond two GPUs has usually not improved framerates – having said that, I always used to test with no mods installed. However, the benchmark and gameplay do suffer from inconsistent lag. Crysis 3 – Framerates taken from the very beginning of the game (just after Psycho has given you his pistol). This game loves SLI. Being able to move with 60FPS feels strange – much like when you play Crysis for the first time when it’s at a high framerate. FarCry 3 – Perfect scaling for two GPUs, a healthy result for three GPUs and the fourth GPU is adding nothing. Ho hum. GTA V – Framerates taken from the very beginning of the story mode, so it could be argued that it’s not representative of the main game. Poor scaling, but it does allow the magical 60FPS target to be reached. Hitman: Absolution – Good scaling, with three GPUs meeting the desired 60 FPS target. Just Cause 2 – included for a laugh. Lords of the Fallen – Two GPUs seem to be the sweet spot for this game. Metro 2033 and Last Light – These games perform somewhat similarly. However, Metro 2033 seems to love the fourth GPU. Excellent news for me as I love the Metro games and I haven’t played the Redux versions yet. Resident Evil 6 – Smashed by the Titan X, no need for SLI! Star Citizen – this caught me off guard as the Crysis 3 engine is reputed to scale well with SLI. Still, It’s worth picking up a second GPU to smooth out the framerates. Hopefully the team behind it will address this in the future. Thief – Only needs two GPUs: a third raises average values but drops minimums, exacerbated by a fourth GPU. Tomb Raider – Three GPUs good: four GPUs bad. Valley Benchmark – meh, you can draw your own conclusions! Overclocking To term an overclock as stable, I loop the Heaven Valley Benchmark at the settings I have used to run benchmarks for three hours. I start by independently finding the maximum core and memory overclocks that can run for a minute or so, then combine them. I have found this to be sufficient in the past but every now and again I have run into a game which isn't stable enough, in which case a simple bump down to the next increment for both the core and memory is enough in 99% of cases to solve it. After half a day’s work, I got the boost core to 1354 MHz and the memory to 7960 MHz (so close to 8000 MHz!), which is roughly in line with what I’ve seen from reviews – the fact that it’s a Superclocked version doesn't seem to have made the slightest bit of difference to the overclocking ability: there again, I am overclocking four GPUs at the same time! The results are below. So, as you can see, a mixed bag. Certainly a nice, healthy average overclock. Metro 2033 responds particularly well for some reason – I guess it’s using processes that take advantage of both clock speeds and memory speeds. For Crysis, overclocking actually seems to smooth the gameplay out a little. Ryse: Son of Rome - this was not run with supersampling for these tests (though I cover it in a later section). Very smooth gameplay, the game responded well to SLI. Annoyingly I forgot about it until I had installed the fourth GPU, hence why it’s only in the overclocking results and the results in a following section. X Rebirth – I didn’t include it until now because it’s known to not be SLI compatible. Temperatures, power levels and noise The default fan profile set by Nvida keeps a Titan X at 80°C under load. One by itself is inaudible. Four on the other hand gets relatively noisy but surprising quiet – at stock anyway. Overclocking understandably results in more heat and the noise ramps up considerably. However, it isn't an issue with my closed headphones. I used my UPS’ inbuilt power reading capability to monitor during benchmarks but it only seems to be accurate to ±27 W and I have no idea about its time sensitivity (i.e. how short a spike duration it can detect). Additionally, I have subtracted values for the monitors I have attached (108 W each) which have the same tolerance, so bear that in mind when looking at the power results below: I did briefly measure power usage of my system with three 780s in a while ago and it came to about 945 W. Damn those Titans are energy efficient! 3200p test (incorporating memory usage results) So, what's more extreme than 4K? Well, aside from the obvious '4K three screen surround' option (which I don't like and have no inclination to fork out even more money for), Nvidia's DSR technology allows me to upscale a 2560x1600 display to 5120x3200! That is near enough double the pixel count of a single 4K monitor! I did try a couple of games on a 780 but it either didn't have the performance capacity (Mirror's Edge) or choked on the VRAM requirements (X Rebirth). Even an easy to run game such as Homeworld Remastered can give a 780 a relatively hard time at 5120x3200 (though it was also running 16xAA and 8x transparency AA). There is no finer antialiasing than true downscaling. Combine that with applying 4x or even 8x AA (or more!) an you end up with an image that is for lack of a better description, flawless - even when in motion. However, text becomes hilariously small. Anyway, results below: This left me with a true first world problem: do I continue using the UltraHD monitor or switch back to the Dell 3007? UltraHD advantages: Less performance demanding (never thought I'd write that!) Fine pixel pitch allows fine details to really come out Beautiful colours UltraHD disadvantages: Still can notice 'shimmering' effect when in motion Very slight lag (not enough for me to care, may affect the twitch gamers out there) Can get 'split' screen issues at low framerates 3200p advantages: No 'shimmering' effect Holy crap! I'm rendering at 3200p! More 'stable' than UltraHD Game doesn't support AA? Now it does! No lag 3200p disadvantages: Lower pixel density means you can see individual pixels when concentrating Using it means my nice UltraHD monitor goes to waste Colours not quite as good as UltraHD monitor (though still damn good!) More performance demanding Stupidly small writing / HUD scaling. Here are a few images I took from Mirror’s Edge, a game I find that really tests antialiasing settings to their maximum. 4K Image 1 3200p Image 1 (cropped to 2880p) 4K Image 2 3200p Image 2 (cropped to 2880p) Now, on a 1600p screen, the images look identical (well, excepting the fact that I messed up the angle slightly in the second comparison image). However, on an UltraHD screen a slight difference is visible when looking at chain link fences or the posters – they are ever so slightly sharper. It’s one of those things that once you’re aware of it, it bugs you! In the end, I can't stand the thought of either not using my UltraHD monitor or selling the UltraHD monitor at a huge financial loss. I suppose UltraHD 8xAA will 'just' have to do in the meantime. Also, the performance hit of 3200p is very large, so hey ho. Let’s move on to memory usage – a subject of much heated discussion in some places. There have been many saying that 12GB was a ludicrously large amount of memory to put on the Titan X, and they’d be right – if you only look at UltraHD use. Nvidia have clearly thought about those who want to pursue the (currently) insanely high resolutions. What do I think? For UltraHD, 4GB is currently enough provided you’re not trying to run at the very highest settings. For anything over 4GB, you need the performance of a Titan anyway to be able to push out the framerates. On a side note, look at Hitman: Absolution's memory usage. It's over 9000!!! A glimpse at 8k It turns out that Ryse: Son of Rome has an inbuilt downscaling option, meaning that I could simulate running 8k. I am aware that there are methods for running games at 8k but they are limited to DirectX9 games. Running Ryse: Son of Rome at 8k resulted in ~14 FPS and a memory usage of 6658 MB. Hence, GPU power is nowhere near ready to handle 8k at the moment. Memory wise, I would expect 8GB Nvidia and AMD variants to be emerging soon, which would have capacity to deal with games at 8k; this is academic however as only very old games will run on these cards at 8k. But boy, does it look nice… FAQ What next? First off, I’m going to head into the Nvidia Control Panel to tweak the games to my liking, then it’s time to play several games I’ve been holding off from playing. Ryse: Son of Rome is supposed to be quite short, so I think I’ll crunch through it. Then time to play Crysis 3 without having to worry about framerates! I’m not quite sure whether I want to go with my back up plan of having tri-SLI, with the spare Titan going into my HTPC or not. I have three weeks to decide, so plenty of time to play around and get a feel for it. So far I’m leaning towards keeping the four way set up and picking up a 970 to tide me over until the rumoured 980Ti is released. I feel I should look into watercooling as I have never done it before. However, although I initially have a lot of energy to do things, once things are set up, I get lazy and am content that things are working - after all, if it ain't broke, don't fix it, right?! I'm also curious about RAMdisks: I like the thought of loading up the current game I'm playing pretty much instantly and not having to worry about potential texture pop-in. However, given the current setup of my game drive, I'm more than likely not going to act on it - after all, it might ruin my nice stable CPU overclock and getting 64GB of 3000MHz RAM is as far as I know a) not possible and b) probably laughably expensive. Additionally, I was fortunate enough to meet andrew8200m, who had tried this before, who reported that games can actually flake out when installed on a RAMdisk as they install too fast! When Windows 10 comes along, I'm playing with the idea of installing an M.2 SSD. I have one on my HTPC and the thing is damn fast! I'll take out the 250GB EVO drive, make the 500GB EVO drive the scratch drive and add another 1TB EVO to the RAID0 game drive. Looking way into the future, I will upgrade to 8K whenever it is launched - hopefully a decent 40" monitor will be released. However, it remains to be seen if GPUs will be able to cope at time of launch. But what about other upcoming cards? Well, I'm an Nvidia fan through and through and have no problems admitting it. I know that AMD have the 3xx series almost ready (according to rumours) but I know where I am with Nvidia, plus the new AMD cards will probably run hot, power hungry and won't actually be that cheap. Also on the horizon is the 980Ti in June/July but I don't see Nvidia letting it perform the same as a Titan X, plus it'll probably cost somewhere between a Titan X and a GTX 980 anyway. Besides, something is always 'just around the corner' - you have to take the plunge at some point! Why do you have all this GPU power and 'only' a 5930K? My main rig is purely a gaming rig, though I do do some work on it from time to time - nothing multithreaded or long enough to justify a beast like the 5960X. With gaming in mind, the two aforementioned processors perform equally in games. I decided I was more likely to get a higher clock speed out of a 5930K than I was a 5960X, which would influence games more (providing I'm being CPU limited). Anyway, 4.5GHz is a pleasing result for me - since the days of my old i7 920 I've had consistently bad luck with the silicon lottery, so it's nice to have a decent chip again. Final words Well, that's me sorted for the next two years at least. I think I'll wait until a fourth generation Titan emerges before upgrading again (the Titan X being second generation in my eyes). My next concern is when Windows 10 comes out - I can't wait to see what DirectX 12 brings to the table. If it does what it says it does, I may need a new CPU (and probably motherboard) depending on Intel's offering at the time...
Awesome read, thank you. Enjoy that beast of a machine! Did you use the blck to overclock the CPU? I have with mine slightly, also using the multiplier to reach 4,480Mhz. I am running slightly less v-core, but system agent and ram voltage needed increasing. Edit: I would water-cool that setup, although it is a great heater in winter! You could take the overclock that much further, to the point tri-sli will beat out any 4-way benefits. I would almost certainly use the 4th card in your other rig, as the driver support and scaling for 4-way is notoriously poor. The 980ti is rumored to be next month, but my second Titan X is still being installed. As you say, the price will be between the 980 and Titan, without the same buffer size. I have seen nearly 7000MB usage in games, so these are more futureproof (a total misnomer in computing).
Wow! Nice work Pete! I'd kill for just one of those cards (does that mean my price for murder is about £900?) Give us a few more glamour shots of the rig will ya!?
Wow! Nice work Pete! I'd kill for just one of those cards (does that mean my price for murder is about £900?) Give us a few more glamour shots of the rig will ya!?
Insane rig pete! I'ts difficult to fathom that Metro 2033 can bring a quad Titan x Machine to it's knees.
The BCLK is set to 125MHz since the RAM needs it like that to reach 3000MHz - obviously that means I've got a 36x multiplier going on. Damn, I forgot to mention the heat, despite having it in one of the titles! Yes, it's like a hair dryer. Luckily my house keeps cool even during summer, so heat isn't an issue. I agree with you on the tri SLI view, but I like having four GPUs installed now - it looks nice! I'm on super crappy random dropout phone internet as BT apparently couldn't be arsed to turn up on Friday, but I'll take a few more for you if you like! I'm currently trying to get a score uploaded for 3DMark (and fold laundry, and assemble flatpack furniture, and do some gardening etc.) but the previously mentioned internet problem is stopping it from working.
So a Titan X is about £900, a 5930K about £460, £330 for 16gb of DDR4, another £200 for a motherboard, and £200 for a beefy PSU. £4800 (assuming you have a case and drives lying around). MustnotraidtheISAmustnotraidtheISAmustnotraidtheISAmustnotraidtheISA...
I second the request for more photos! MOAR!! Mine is 127 or 128, not much of a difference. The coolers are the best, even at 60 or 70% speed the noise is a whooshing rather than whine. You're right, with that much exorbitance why start being practical!
So true Pete four is better than three that's why I haven't upgraded for a while because I would have to buy four. Your rig looks good apart from the SLI bridge that spoils it BTW I have a nice EVGA 4 way bridge that lights up if your interested
Update: some results with new drivers Just an quick update as I have installed the latest drivers (352.86) and have found a marked improvement. See below: Note that in the case of these figures, I'd forced 8xAA, 8x transparency AA, 16x anisotropic filtering, quality ambient occlusion and high quality textures in Nvidia Control Panel, so performance increases are even more impressive. If a game isn't mentioned that was previously featured, it's because there was either no difference or I couldn't be bothered to fire it up again (almost always the former). Of particular note is the increase for GTA V, Tomb Raider (four way SLI is now better than three way!) and Star Citizen (60FPS = a good thing for a dogfighting game). Unfortunately, Crysis now crashes after a few minutes - definitely not overclock related. Oh well, maybe the next drivers will fix it. Well, the rest of the PC is pretty boring, but here's a couple of pictures of my study system: Noted and agreed, but I don't spend a lot of time staring at the side of my rig! I have my eyes on the new EVGA 4 way bridge but its price is prohibitive until I sort the rest of my house out.
I was going to offer it to you for post Pete I don't need it one quad SLI rig is enough for me lol let me know if you want it
Just been playing GTA V properly for the first time. Good God, the game is absolutely astounding! Quite performance hungry though - I'm getting good framerates (i.e. I never have slow or stuttery moments) but VRAM usage went up to ~7200MB and RAM usage was at ~9GB. Heh! Well, truth be told, I've now got to work on paying the credit card off. £130 for something that won't affect performance in the slightest and I don't even look at is something that even I find pointless. However... I'll be happy to take it off your hands! I'll chuck in some extra so you can buy a pint (or whatever your particular vice is ) on me. I'll send a PM in a minute with my postage details - send me your bank details and costs and I'll wire the money over.
