NVIDIA's TITAN Z is an odd GPU. On one hand it is the most powerful graphics card the company has ever launched and yet the amount of media coverage for it has been surprisingly limited. Reviews have been few and far between and despite a very public announcement, its eventual coming out party was muted at best. Considering the well-oiled PR machine NVIDIA has working behind every one of their new product introductions, the TITAN Z's somewhat flaccid release was atypical. And yet from our perspective, after some last minute changes it went exactly the way they wanted it to.

To understand the TITAN-Z's troubled inception and ultimate relegation to a footnote in NVIDIA's product line, we have to go back to before NVIDIA's chief Jen Hsun Huang actually announced it back at the end of March. NVIDIA had already been working on their dual GPU follow-up to the extremely popular GTX 690 for quite some time. It included a pair of toned-down GK110 cores topped off by an air cooled heatsink and remained true to Kepler's ?efficient, quiet performance? mantra. They took a relatively conservative approach with the knowledge that AMD had no way to roll out a double-dipped R9 290X without either severely limiting its clock speeds or boosting fan speeds to laughably high levels.

Right before that fateful March 25th keynote, the first confirmations of AMD's so-called R9 295X2 began to trickle out and it wasn't good news for NVIDIA. Instead of going the air-cooled route, AMD's engineers and product specialists threw their weight behind what they hoped was the market's broader acceptance of AIO water cooling units. More importantly, by going the liquid cooled route, the R9 295X2 was able to run at high clock speeds without throttling, had a good amount of overclocking headroom and remained blissfully quiet. With that knowledge, plans were changed.