EAH5870 MATRIX -- The Radeon HD 5870 in 6th gear...

When ATI released the DirectX 11 compatible Radeon HD series 5800 less than a year ago, they hit a homerun. Excellent, really excellent performance, great feature set, good thermals, very acceptable power consumption, yeah they delivered a card the way it's meant to be used alright.

Many moons have passed and ATI gave their partners the thumbs up to create little werewolves. See, when it's a full moon the R5870 turns into something geeky, extraordinary, even a bit hairy. Yes, the OC editions of the Radeon HD 5870 series were unleashed. Unlocked and loaded. As a result we started seeing some really interesting products like Gigabyte's SOC, MSI's Lightning, HIS has nice overclocked Turbo models, PowerColor's PCS++ is good overclocked kit as well.

The one product we have been anticipating however comes from ASUS. And no, we are not even talking about the ARES series but in fact the Matrix Platinum series.

What makes this product series so special is that it has been designed with the ROG team (Republic of Gamers), a small group of enthusiasts within the ASUS campus. Little red colored minions that drink LN2 and taze each other just for fun. They live by one rule only, gain the maximum performance out of a product... and do things right.

As such, they started to design the ASUS Radeon 5870 Matrix Platinum. In all its ways this card needs to be extreme, so we spot a custom PCB, some extraordinary cooling, we see a 2 GB memory size, we spot a standard overclock, but most of all... the card comes with overclock software that allows voltage tweaking on three domains within the graphics card. Now we know that it's hard, really hard, to get past 1 GHz on the R5870 core with air-cooling. The latest revisions of the GPU have an Especially hard time exceeding that number. This card we actually got clocked to 1050 MHz... and that's a testimony of the excellence we'll be reviewing today. Hey... the ROG team knows how to do it right.

Have a peek at the product, and then let's head onwards into the review.