Review: Nvidia Titan Star Wars edition

V3 puts Nvidia's latest Titan card through its paces, and tests its medichlorian count

It's not every day that we can tell you to get the company credit card out and spend more than £1000 on Star Wars themed products, but today is that day. Nvidia's latest high-end Titan graphics card went on sale Friday, and while it comes with some absolutely stunning design features, this is still the Titan Xp that offers amazing performance in a range of applications.

It's possible to assume, of course, that these Titan cards are aimed at gamers, but that's not really the case. The Titan range sits outside of the traditional gaming segment for Nvidia, instead these are cards that assist with deep learning and other intensive GPU applications. The key in these applications is that Nvidia boosts the number of Cuda cores on this card to 3840. Cuda, like AMDs Stream Processors, are parallel processors that can be used to accelerate certain tasks. Although this requires the support of whatever software you use, but apps like Adobe Premiere and other specialist tools all leverage this power.

High-end gaming cards, like the GTX 1080ti, have slightly fewer Cuda cores (3584 in the 1080ti) but are also a fair bit cheaper at around £680. For special applications the higher memory bandwidth speed of the Titan will also be of benefit and the extra gigabyte of RAM won't hurt either. But if you're trying to decide don't discount cards like the 10 series gaming cards, which are cheaper and offer a lot of bang for their buck.

Interestingly, the Titan has had a further boost recently because Nvidia created itself something of a problem by making those GTX gaming cards so good. Indeed they offered such good value that many users and even business purchasers might have felt like going down a consumer route. Perhaps in response, Nvidia pushed a driver update that managed to unlock "3X the power" in certain applications. Anyone using 3D app Maya would have seen a noticeable boost in performance as a result.

That driver update also added support for housing the GPU in an external chassis. This might well be valuable for business where a lot of people sometimes need access to GPU power. Pop the Titan Xp in an external caddy, and then it can be connected to any compatible desktop or laptop with the additional boost in performance that comes with a card like this.

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Review: Nvidia Titan Star Wars edition

V3 puts Nvidia's latest Titan card through its paces, and tests its medichlorian count

This all pushes the Titan to near the range of Nvidia's Quadro cards. Certainly in clock speed, memory speed and Cuda cores the Titan is now shoulder-to-shoulder with some of the Quadro cards (like the P6000). The advantage, of course, is that the Quadro P6000 costs about £5000, and the Titan £1150, which means you can either save money or outfit more computers with high-end GPUs depending on your needs.

The Star Wars design is exceptionally fun from an aesthetic point of view. Some people might have reservations about the GPUs design in general, but it's quite well thought-out for professional use. Nvidia's reference design uses a blower card, which draws air from inside the PC case, across the components on the card and their associated heatsinks. This means you exhaust hot air out of the back, which is fine for most us. The problem is that the fans on these cards run constantly, while an open design can stop the fans when the cards are near idle. You might want to consider this is noise is an issue for you.

The Jedi theme of the card we tested also suggests that Nvidia has put a lot of effort into making this card well. The metal of the external case gives it weight, but the supportive backplane means that the card can support that weight in your PC. The only longterm concern is how the built-in fan will hold up under years of constant use. Replacing it might be irksome, and it's impossible to tell how long it might last. Still, there are no reasons to suspect a long and happy life isn't possible.

So while there's no need for most people to bother with a Jedi or Galactic Empire card they are enormously cool. If you're considering a Titan Xp anyway, they cost no more than the standard cards and look a lot better. The inclusion of either red or green LEDs won't concern most non-gaming users, but they're generally hidden away unless you intend to showcase them.

If you consider using GPUs for a couple of years, then selling them down the road then getting a Star Wars card will no-doubt help you sell it quicker, and for a higher price later on. The Titan offers a lot of grunt that's wasted on many gamers, so if your use is mixed and you do things like video editing, 3D rendering or mine cryptocurrencies then the Titan is a good solution for you and the Star Wars theme is a nice bonus.

The Nvidia Titan Xp Collector's Edition is available now in two versions. We tested the Jedi Order card but the less visually-impressive Galactic Empire card is also an option. Like many GPUs currently, orders are limited to two per customer. May the force be with you.