14 DAY TRIAL // Certain things happened on the graphics card market recently, things that really dropped the anvil on NVIDIA's graphics card lineup, leading to the decision to release the GeForce GTX 780 GHz Edition.
NVIDIA is borrowing AMD's way of naming the products. Since the latter has things like Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition and HD 7870 GHz Edition, NVIDIA is preparing the GeForce GTX 780 GHz edition to compensate.
Then again, it's not those two AMD boards that are giving NVIDIA a headache. Instead, it's the Radeon R9 290 and 290X.
It wasn't bad enough that the Radeon R9 290X cost $550 / €550 despite matching GTX Titan in performance ($1000 / €1000). AMD went ahead and put together the R9 290 too, which is slightly slower but sells for $449 / €449.
So, when you have two rival video cards that are better than your second best but almost as cheap or even cheaper, then you have a problem.
And since NVIDIA isn't comfortable cutting the price of the GTX 780 any further (it's at $500 / €500 right now), it only had a factory overclock as an alternative.
So the Sunnyvale company is preparing the GeForce GTX 780 GHz Edition, whose GPU operates at 1006 MHz (Base) and 1046 MHz (GPU Boost). The 3 GB of GDDR5 are left alone though, at 6 GHz.
According to Expreview, the Inno3D GTX 780 iChill HerculeZ 3000 graphics card is based on the new model.
Speaking of which, the GPU is a new stepping, called GK110-300-B1 (the original is GK110-300-A1) with a negligibly higher power consumption.
The Inno3D GTX 780 iChill HerculeZ 3000 was labeled as 15% faster than a standard GTX 780 (863/900 GPU clocks) and 7% better than even GTX Titan. What's more, compared to AMD Radeon R9 290X, it is supposedly 6.2% faster on the same test-bed.