ASUS Radeon HD 7970 ROG MATRIX Platinum review - Introduction

Today we review something special; the ASUS Radeon HD Matrix Platinum. AMD's entire 28nm GPU line-up has been unleashed and slowly but steadily we are already moving onwards to the 8000 series products. But currently all the way on top is the 7900 series, armed with a GPU codenamed Tahiti, a release which was received quite positively on the market.

Today in the spotlight we have ASUS, they are releasing several customized 7900 models but today specifically we test their dark daemon, el Diablo itself ... It is the ASUS R7970 MATRIX Platinum -- a three slot wide beast with massive cooling capacity.

First off, there are two SKUs. The 'Matrix' with a 1050 Mhz core' and the 'Matrix Platinum' with a 1.1 GHz GPU core which also comes as premium hand-picked model. 

The completely customized card comes with voltage measurement points, a 20-phase super alloy power design with thus super alloy caps and chokes as well as a special SAP capacitor added to maximize overclocking headroom, according to Asus.

Including the cooler, this card is three slot wide, the cooling itself uses two 100mm fans sitting on top of a big aluminum heatsink, while most of the PCB is covered with an aluminum heatspreader. The cooler is able to keep the product under 70 Degrees C, and that's under full load and stress without making any real noise.

ASUS claims its design keeps the core 20% cooler than AMD’s reference design, which allowed the company to push the Radeon HD 7970 over its reference frequencies. The product as such comes factory overclocked. The GPU will be clocked at 1.1GHz while the memory will tact in at a 6.6Gbps data rate.

There's more though, the HD 7970 Matrix Premium comes with two DVI outputs as well as with four DisplayPort connectors. In theory this design allows for up to six displays to be connected in Eyefinity mode.

So have a peek at the ASUS Radeon HD 7970 Matrix Platinum, a product with very nice game performance, a great feature set and a frame buffer that will pop your eyes out as yeah, the graphics card has a cool 3GB GDDR5 graphics memory.

Let's have a look at this Southern Island GPU family member under the codename "Tahiti". Head over to the next page where we'll start-up the technology overview first.