Nvidia Finally Launches the Titan Z

It’s only a month late and a dollar short…

May 28, 2014 by

Titan_Z_0000_Fully-Assembled

In a glorious wave of reviews and press releases Nvidia launched its dual GPU Titan Z today. Oh wait, that’s right, there were no reviews because Nvidia didn’t sample the card. Instead all we have is a pile of press releases, some promo videos, and a whole lot of nothing. As launches go this is without a doubt the feeblest effort we’ve seen from Nvidia in quite a long time. So far the card is a month late, more than $1500 too expensive, and was not sampled to any reviewers what so ever.

If that doesn’t tell you everything you need to know about this ill-fated GPU then I don’t know what will.

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That said there are two rays of hope for this card. One is small form factor PC builds where power supply size is limited and the slightly smaller, but still massive amount of power that the Titan Z draws makes it better suited to this use than the Radeon R9 295 X2. You still have to pay through the nose for it, but if cost is no object and power is the limiting factor in your build than this card might make sense.

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The other ray of hope is CUDA. There are a lot of universities and research institutions that have standardized on CUDA and are looking to get the most DP compute in the smallest space for the least amount of money. Here too the Titan Z fits the bill, if only because it has no competition due to the customers being completely locked into the CUDA ecosystem.

Titan_Z_0002_Fan-Only

Outside of those two niches though the Titan Z looks to be at best in the ball park of a R9 295 X2 in performance and at worst completely uncompetitive in terms of performance per dollar. I mean really guys, come on, are you even trying?

With this launch Nvidia has solidified the fact that their Titan branded GPUs exist for one reason: to squeeze money out of graduate students and research institutions. They are not relevant to gamers, system builders, or anyone outside of that specific niche really. So congratulations to Nvidia on launching another Titan, and drop us a line when big Maxwell is finally here.S|A

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Thomas Ryan

Author at SemiAccurate
Thomas Ryan is a freelance technology writer and photographer from Seattle, living in Austin. You can also find his work on SemiAccurate and PCWorld. He has a BA in Geography from the University of Washington with a minor in Urban Design and Planning and specializes in geospatial data science. If you have a hardware performance question or an interesting data set Thomas has you covered.