Final words and conclusion
The Matrix Platinum Radeon HD 5870 is a massively impressive product. The tweakability of the card is grand, the tweaking options are on par with what you can expect from the ROG team, this really is an excellent product in all its lengths.
The Radeon HD 5870 series obviously all by itself (baseline performance) is already a stunning performer. ASUS will overclock the card to 900 MHz for you at default which actually is a bit shy in our opinion, as with a bit of tweaking you will be able to lift it over 1000 MHz quite quickly. After 1050 MHz things get tricky and difficult real fast though, the GPU will start to show artifacts, so on air really that is going to be your limit. This card with some LCS would have been wicked alright. Unfortunately due to the custom PCB, a regular liquid cooling block is not going to fit, but that would have been awesome.
The effect of the standard 50 MHz overclock over default however is a little trivial, good here and there, but not that much of a difference in other places. Even at default clocks the card is a beast already, we certainly can't complain at playing COD Modern Warfare 2 at 2560x1200 with 4xAA and the very best image quality settings and still retrieve an average framerate of over 90 FPS. The same for Anno 1404 (yeah I really like this title), if we take a more common resolution then at 1920x1200 we see the card push out an average framerate of 75+ FPS with 4xAA enabled.
Graphics memory then. We've checked this out before with Radeon HD 5870 cards, but an increase from one towards two GB of graphics memory might seem nice, but unfortunately it shows no benefits in overall performance. Maybe a frame per second here and there but that's it really. So that alone and with maybe a game or two in mind that could benefit from the extra frame buffer we do feel it is not a reason to spend more money on a graphics card while it increases the price of the card.
As impressive as the card is, the biggest downside is going top be the price tag. This might be a Platinum edition, but... the price tag is platinum as well at roughly 500 EUR whereas you can pickup a regular Radeon HD 5870 for 365 EUR. That's a 135 EUR difference. That's not all, we see the Radeon 5970 sell at 515~550 EUR at this very moment, which game performance wise will bring much more to the table in terms of gameplay.
None the less, for that money you do purchase what I consider to be one of the best Radeon HD 5870 cards currently available on the market. The performance is grand, the tweakability awesome and the cooling itself is impressive yet not too loud (under normal circumstances). We happily grant it our best tweakers essential award, but a little voice in the back of my head continuously challenges me whether or not the performance difference is worth the extra money. But that's your call to make of course, we just present the awesomeness that this product really is -- and you get to decide whether or not it is worth that kind of cash. And for the die-hard overclockers out there, this product is severe l33tness.
Thanks go out to ASUS Benelux for getting this card in the lab with ROG like swiftness.
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