EVGA GeForce GTX 750 Ti FTW hands-on review

[Stefan]

Just upgraded my old rig with EVGA GeForce GTX 750 Ti FTW w/ EVGA ACX Cooling

I don't waste your time by repeating benchmarks already shown on major news sites.

Fan-speed detection in Geeks3D programs needs to be updated.
Maxwell stands FurMark easily, only 55°C with 8xMSAA

AMD LEO, FluidMark, TessMark, NVIDIA Alien vs. Triangles, NVIDIA Endless City produce only max. 46°C

GPU-Z always reads DirectX 11.1, even under Windows XP.

NVFLASH support for GM107 begins with v5.142

If you like to have tested some CUDA accelerated apps, let me know.
I suggest to compile them against CUDA 6.0 RC SDK to exploit Maxwell's capabilities.

[nuninho1980]

Ok. Why have you replaced videocard? But GTX 750 Ti isn't important because it hasn't any newer version of shader model yet. And you don't get good upgrade after your GTX 465.

[Stefan]

It's all about thermal power draw and compute power.
Study the article  5 Things You Should Know About the New Maxwell GPU Architecture and the topic in NVIDIA's developer forum  So what's new about Maxwell? where the people are pretty excited.

A friend of mine will be getting 10 (Maxwells). His first mining farm.
...
After recompiling my image processing codes, the instruction count reduced by 12% and kernel time by 22% !
...
Integer logical performance indeed got a huge boost in Maxwell (compared to Kepler). GTX750 can push almost similar SHA-1 digesting performance as the GK110-based GTX780 (!) I'm really impressed, especially if we compare Maxwell against GK10x.

[JeGX]

Nice quick review Stefan!
As soon as the new GpuTest will be online, try the new fp32/fp64 OpenGL test...

For the speed fan detection, I noticed that only fan speed RPM was reported, not the fan speed percent. Maybe a bug in my tools or something wrong with recent nv drivers. Will look at this asap.

[Stefan]

As soon as the new GpuTest will be online, try the new fp32/fp64 OpenGL test...

...or something wrong with recent nv drivers.

I made some tests in 1280x720 windowed mode.

Julia fp64 - 31 fps
Julia fp32 - 395 fps

Furmark and Volplosion performed at exactly 60 FPS.
At first i thought it was a weird Vsync bug, but it's just coincidence.

Regarding NVIDIA's driver: i can't quit any program in fullscreen mode without freezing the desktop with R334 drivers.
Fooling around with TDR didn't help.
Judging from their forum a lot of people have issues with recent drivers.



Little heads-up from F@H:

"I have high hopes for Maxwell. We'll be optimizing OpenMM for it."

Vijay Pande
Director, Folding@home Distributed Computing Project

Another heads-up from Arion renderer

We're adapting the Arion Core so it runs on CUDA 6 Release Candidate, which was released some days ago. Our setups carry the run-time CUDA .dll, but your drivers may need to be upgraded when Arion for 3ds Max v2.7.0 is released.
Update: Fortunately, this time upgrading the build system from CUDA 5 to CUDA 6 has been easy!
Update: I spoke too fast. CUDA 6 has broken instancing... Been working on that for the past 8 hours...

EDIT: Arion 2.5 built against CUDA 5.0 takes 7:28 min, i'll recheck with Arion 2.7 when it's available.

[JeGX]

Stefan, have you tried CUDAMiner?

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=167229.0

[Stefan]

Stefan, have you tried CUDAMiner?

No, i don't believe in cryptocurrencies.
However, the developer might share his CUDA optimisation tricks in the NVIDIA forum mentioned above.



mobile Maxwell heads-up :
A happy user at Notebook review introduces his GTX 860M powered rig.

Attention - GTX 860M comes in 2 flavors:
Kepler - NVIDIA_DEV.119A = "NVIDIA GeForce GTX 860M"
Maxwell - NVIDIA_DEV.1392 = "NVIDIA GeForce GTX 860M"

[Stefan]

EVGA GTX 750 Ti FTW BIOS Update (Reduced Fan Noise)

We now have an update available that will reduce the fan noise level while the card is idle. This update is ONLY for the EVGA GTX 750 Ti FTW model (with ACX Cooler), part number: 02G-P4-3757-KR. This update is already being applied to new cards that are shipping now.

The update to fan acoustics is the only change in this BIOS. Also please keep in mind it will not lower the minimum allowed fanspeed (42%), but the acoustic level will be lower. To update please follow the below instructions:


    Download the following .zip file: ftp://ftp.evga.com/bios/3757_Update.zip
    Extract the .zip file to a temporary location.
    It is recommended to UNINSTALL your NVIDIA display drivers.
    After display drivers are removed, run update.exe located in the folder that was extracted earlier.
    Reboot and reinstall the NVIDIA display drivers.

A successful flash procedure looks like this



If you don't uninstall GeForce driver a backup ends with an error and the system becomes unresponsive (i guess a flash will fail the same way, but i wasn't dumb enough to try)





Heads-up from GPUGrid

Just a line to say we've got our first GTX750Ti card up and running. The performance out-of-the-box matches a GTX480. We'll have a public app for GPUGRID just as soon as CUDA 6.0 is publicly released, which will probably happen at GTC at the end of the month.