Nvidia has rolled out the first desktop GTX 700 series card and as you all know by now we are talking about the GTX 780. As usual, Nvidia kicked off the series with a flagship model, although this time there is a slight twist. The GTX Titan is still the fastest NV single GPU card, but officially it is not part of the GTX 700 series, or the GTX 600 series for that matter. The new GTX 780 is basically a watered down Titan.

Both cards are based on the GK110 chip, so the “new” generation doesn’t really bring a lot of new stuff to the tablet. The GTX 780 has 12 active SMX blocks out of a total of 15 SMX blocks in the GK110. It has 2304 CUDA cores and even the Titan isn’t the full GK110, as it has 14 active SMX blocks. It is possible that Nvidia still has an ace to pull out of its sleeve and come up with something even faster over the next few months, although we wouldn’t bet on it. Specification wise the GTX 780 ended up with 50% more CUDA cores than its predecessor.

Nvidia also plans to roll out the GTX 770 over the next few days. Next month we’re expecting the GTX 760 Ti, and as far as the GTX 770 goes it looks like a faster revamp of the GTX 680.

The EVGA GTX 780 Superclocked works at a 967MHz base clock, while the reference GPU base clock is set at 863MHz. Nvidia's GPU Boost 2.0 takes the GPU clock up to 900MHz for the reference GPU and up to 1020MHz for the Superclocked card.

The GTX 780 ships with 3GB of GDDR5 memory, while the GTX Titan has 6GB and the GTX 680 comes with 2GB of GDDR5. The memory speed on all three cards is 6008MHz.

The GTX 780 and GTX Titan feature a 384-bit memory interface, while the GTX 680 is still on a 256-bit interface. The GTX 780 and Titan has 48 ROPs, while the GTX 680 has just four 64-bit connections and 32 ROPs.

The GTX 780 and Titan have a TDP of 250W, although we expect the GTX 780 to be a bit more efficient. It still needs a 6-pin and 8-pin power connector.