Although NVIDIA officially unveiled its Volta-based GV100 GPU over seven months ago, and an unwitting intern may have leaked pictures of the card we’re going to show you here today shortly thereafter, the NVIDIA TITAN V featuring the GV100 GPU began shipping just this past week. The NVIDIA TITAN V targets a very specific audience and is designed for professional and academic deep learning applications, which partly explains its lofty $3,000 price tag.



Here’s a quick run-down of the NVIDIA TITAN V’s main features and specifications. Give those a gander, check out the sexy pics of this gorgeous, gold-clad GPU, and then we’ll move on to the numbers. Before you do that though, maybe grab a couple of tissues and hide your credit card...

                                        Nvidia TITAN V

Graphics Processing Clusters                                                    6
Streaming Multiprocessors                                                      80
CUDA Cores (single precision)                                            5120
FP64 Cores (double precision)                                             2560 
Texture Units                                                                           320
ROP Units                                                                                  96
Base Clock                                                                    1200 MHz
Boost Clock                                                                  1455 MHz
Memory Clock (HBM2)                                                850 MHz
L2 Cache Size                                                                  4608KB 
Total Video Memory                                        12,288MB HBM2
Memory Interface                                                           3072-Bit
Total Memory Bandwidth                                          652.8 GB/s
Texture Filtering Rate (Bilinear)                  384 GigaTexels/sec
Fabrication Process                                                             12 nm
Transistor Count                                                        21.1 Billion
Connectors                                        3 x Display Port, 1 x HDMI
Form Factor                                                                   Dual Slot
Power Connectors                                      One 8-Pin, One 6-Pin
Recommended Power Supply                                      600 Watts
Thermal Design Power (TDP)                                     250 Watts
Thermal Threshold                                                              91°C

                          

It's important to note that the Titan V isn't billed as a gaming card—Nvidia even told us directly that "Titan V is not for gaming" when I inquired about getting a review sample. Obviously, $2,999 for just a graphics card is an obscene amount of money, and I get that the most important feature for the target audience is the compute performance, specifically using algorithms that can leverage the Tensor cores, but we still want to know how it fares in other workloads.





From a design perspective, the Titan V is mostly unchanged externally from the Titan Xp or GTX 1080 Ti implementations. We have a two-slot, blower-style cooler with the angular shroud design. The Titan V gets the champagne treatment for color, making it unique in that way. The Titan V has a 250 watt TDP and requires an 8-pin and 6-pin power connector to operate. External output connections include 3x DisplayPort and 1x HDMI; again the same as other recent NVIDIA Founders Edition hardware. Despite that fact that it looks the same, the cooler on the Titan V is new too. It is still a vapor chamber design but instead of using a copper base and aluminum fins, the fins on this cooler are all copper as well. This gives the card a definite heft increase, and was the first thing we noticed when taking it out the box in the office.

One of the things we always check for on a new graphics card or partner card is the clock speed consistency. With GPU Boost modifying the clocks of the GPU in order to maintain power, thermal, and voltage thresholds, we like to see how the performance of the card changes and levels out during extended use. We take advantage of the looping benchmark of Unigine Heaven for our workload and use GPU-Z to monitor clocks and temps courtesy of the NVAPI.

Results are interesting – the Volta GPU on the Titan V starts well above the 1700 MHz mark but after just 2 minutes of run time we drop below the 1600 MHz mark and find the comfortable resting place. The average from this run, with the early higher clock rates included, comes to 1602 MHz, giving you an idea of here the Titan V will operate for gaming sessions.