Tuesday, April 29th 2014
GeForce GTX TITAN-Z Market Availability Delayed?
NVIDIA's flagship dual-GPU graphics card, the GeForce GTX TITAN-Z, was expected to go on sale later today. That launch is now delayed, according to a SweClockers report. The three thousand Dollar question is why. According to some sources, NVIDIA is effecting a last minute design change that sees a meatier cooler on the card, than the one Jen-Hsun Huang rafikied to the press at GTC 2014.
There may have been a last-minute realization at Santa Clara, that the card - as presented at GTC - may not cut it in the ring against AMD's Radeon R9 295X2, or at least it won't be able to warrant its vulgar $3000 price tag, against the R9 295X2's $1500; despite AMD's rather messy three-piece approach to its liquid-cooled product (the card itself, a radiator, and coolant tubing), and so NVIDIA could be redesigning the GTX TITAN-Z with an even bigger cooler, to facilitate higher clock speeds.So, what's changed? Eagle-eyed market sleuths noticed a difference between the press-shots NVIDIA released at GTC, and the ones online retailers put up to solicit pre-orders. The card "originally" had a 2.5-slot thick cooler; while the one in the press-shots retailers put up appears to have a full 3-slot thick one. There is no word on when NVIDIA will make this beefier, sweatier GTX TITAN-Z available for people with three grand to spend on a graphics card.
There may have been a last-minute realization at Santa Clara, that the card - as presented at GTC - may not cut it in the ring against AMD's Radeon R9 295X2, or at least it won't be able to warrant its vulgar $3000 price tag, against the R9 295X2's $1500; despite AMD's rather messy three-piece approach to its liquid-cooled product (the card itself, a radiator, and coolant tubing), and so NVIDIA could be redesigning the GTX TITAN-Z with an even bigger cooler, to facilitate higher clock speeds.So, what's changed? Eagle-eyed market sleuths noticed a difference between the press-shots NVIDIA released at GTC, and the ones online retailers put up to solicit pre-orders. The card "originally" had a 2.5-slot thick cooler; while the one in the press-shots retailers put up appears to have a full 3-slot thick one. There is no word on when NVIDIA will make this beefier, sweatier GTX TITAN-Z available for people with three grand to spend on a graphics card.