Nvidia's Titan line is a series of enthusiast-grade hardware, either offering the best iterations of consumer-grade hardware, or separating fools from their money, but often both. Fortunately, I was able to purchase this fine example for USD $700, which is $500 less than its MSRP. I sold my 5700 XT in order to get this card.
For the Geforce 10 series consisting of Pascal-architecture-based cards, Nvidia actually had two Titans. The first, the Titan X Pascal, was essentially a 1080 Ti released a few months before the 1080 Ti and which sold at $1200. It was solely made to separate enthusiasts from their money--the 1080 Ti was almost identical on paper, but the improved third-party coolers that companies like MSI, Gigabyte, and EVGA used made many 1080 Tis noticeably faster and cooler than the Titan X Pascal. They also sold for around $500 less.
So, what's up with the Titan Xp (not to be mistaken with the Titan X Pascal)? This card is the true Titan of its generation, packing a fully-enabled GP102 graphics processor, and all the extra goodies like better power delivery, improved efficiency, and faster memory.
I made a very deliberate choice to purchase this over the similar 1080 Ti--while the 1080 Ti has 11 GB of memory (VRAM), the Titan Xp has 12 GB, which helps for things like machine learning and Adobe Creative Cloud applications like Lightroom that leak VRAM. Furthermore, the 7% increase in enabled shaders (the thousands of tiny little processors in a GPU) grants a significant performance advantage in tasks like Folding@Home.
I actually recommend against purchasing a Titan for most users--even with modification, the stock coolers run hot, and they carry very little tangible benefit for gaming, which is what most people use their GPUs for. Furthermore, older, more-affordably-priced Titans, like the Titan Xp, don't have ray-tracing hardware, though this doesn't affect me. Also, since Nvidia ships most Titans with an inadequate stock cooler similar to this, they will run very hot without modification. I plan to watercool mine, which will significantly reduce temperatures.