Palit GTX780 Ti Jetstream Review

Conclusion

There are a couple of things that are clear from our time spent with the Palit GTX780Ti Jetstream.

The first is that even the most exciting card to test can lead to results so amazingly consistent that we quickly run out of new ways to express them. Lots of fun to play with, not much fun to write about.

The second, and more important by far, result is that the enhanced cooling capabilities of the Jetstream cooler have benefits far beyond that of just being, well, cooler. nVidia’s GPU Boost 2.0 technology works by converting spare thermal capacity into clock speed improvements, and throughout our testing it was clear how much of a benefit this can have. In every test, whether a synthetic benchmark or actual gameplay experience, the Palit comfortably out-performed the reference nVidia card, and in both the 1920×1080 and 2560×1440 resolutions too.

The one area we would have expected to be able to find some big gains, manual overclocking, actually didn’t do better than the nVidia model. The memory was 50MHz shy of the huge score the nVidia GTX780Ti obtained, and the 13MHz extra boost clock speed of the Palit wasn’t able to overcome it. It was extremely close, let their be no doubt, but perhaps a bridge too far.

We’re not overly sold on the cooler. The triple fan design certainly keeps it cool and allows us to make the performance gains at stock that we saw. But the two little fans and one big one surrounded by a strange bronze effect in what is otherwise a sea of cheap-feeling black plastic is hardly something that reeks of quality, especially at the huge price that top-end GPUs are currently selling for. We know that complaining about the aesthetics of your GPU cooler is akin to bemoaning the cup-holders on your Porsche, but we want people to look at our system and get an instant grasp on how much it must have cost to put together. The Palit doesn’t give that air of ‘wow’. Another point is that Palit claim it is 7db quiter than the reference cooler, out of the box plumbed in and left we would go as far as to say it might be AS quieter but its never quieter, it is well worth pointing out it IS cooler though so maybe if you backed off the fans a bit they may still be able to make that claim.

This does mean that we have a nice clear result though. If what you want from a graphics card is to just buy it, plug it in, and then forget about it, the Palit GTX780Ti is absolutely the one for you. It’s as blisteringly quick as we would expect a Kepler-based graphics card to be. It’s phenomenally consistent, not flinching in any of our tests at all and, despite the Jetstream cooler, actually rocks up about the same MSRP as the ordinary GTX780Ti. Just don’t expect it to manually overclock much beyond any similar GK110 card.

For excellent, no fuss, out of the box performance we’re happy to award the Palit GTX780Ti Jetstream our OC3D Gamers Choice Award.

    

Thanks to Palit for supplying the GTX780Ti Jetstream for review. Discuss your thoughts in the OC3D Forums.