Introduction
The PNY GTX 780 Ti XLR8 is an incredibly high performance video card. It consistently surpassed our expectations on what a single card could do. As a leading manufacturer with over 21 years of experience PNY Technologies are well known for delivering products which offer equal helping of performance, quality and value. The latest addition to their video card lineup is the PNY GeForce GTX 780Ti XLR8 which has an MSRP of $699 but can be found online for $10-$20 less. It may sound odd considering it is an enthusiast grade video card, but this new card has been positioned to not only offer bleeding edge performance but also offer consumers a good value.
Terms like value are rather ethereal in nature and defining it can be difficult to say the least. What is a good value to one person bears very little resemblance to someone else’s idea of value. Making things even more difficult for PNY is a certain amount of premium always accompanies class leading performance – and makes no mistake this GeForce GTX 780Ti does have performance to burn.
To accomplish this seemingly Sisyphean task PNY have implemented a multipronged solution that may just make the impossible possible. Firstly, like others have broken their high performance 780Ti series into multiple models: a ‘stock’ 780Ti and a factory overclocked model. The GeForce GTX 780Ti XLR8 is the former and not the latter model. By not having to bin cores or guarantee a level of overclocking PNY has been able to keep this second from the top GeForce GTX 780Ti’s price somewhat in check. While $699 is still a lot of money, it is actually less than what most of the competitions stock 780Ti model’s command and is a full $50 less than PNY’s flagship GeForce GTX 780Ti XLR8 OC model. Backstopping this lower price point, and further boosting value, is PNY have given this card a default 1 year warranty that instantly gets upgraded to a lifetime warranty as soon as you register the card. All you need do is register it within the ‘standard’ warranty period and in return you never have to worry about this cards warranty expiration date again.
On the performance side of things – and helping to explain the less extreme asking price – PNY have opted for both the stock NVIDIA cooler and kept the fully enabled GK110 core at stock settings. This means a base clock of 875Mhz and a boost clock of 928Mhz which is higher than a stock GeForce GTX 780’s specifications of 863/900. Add in the additional 25% cores backed paired to faster RAM and this PNY should have the horsepower to keep up with the demands of any modern game. More importantly this performance boost comes at only a $200 price premium over a stock GeForce GTX 780. Put another way the PNY GeForce GTX 780Ti still costs $300 than a GeForce GTX Titan and has more core enabled than it!
This rather unique blend of performance, price and value is what PNY is counting on to convince consumers to opt for this card over the competitions. But the key question is if this particular stock GeForce GTX 780Ti is not if it is worth the extra $200 over a stock GeForce GTX 780 but whether or not it can justify its $699 MSRP. After all, if this GeForce GTX 780Ti can’t impress, how does the more expensive models ever stand a chance?!
