With the exception of the custom 7990 range of graphics cards that AMD partners have been developing, the most powerful official AMD Radeon graphics card is still the 7970 which competes with the Nvidia GeForce GTX 680 and utilises a powerful single core Tahiti GPU as well as some out of this world specs but some brands aren’t content on leaving it like this and want to put their own spin on things, and we’ve seen this many times before, mainly from Asus, and today is no different.
Today we find the Matrix HD 7970 Platinum card landed in our offices and from what we know about Matrix Platinum cards in the past, they aren’t a force to be reckoned with so this should be no different. Asus have taken a 7970 design and completely changed it by increasing the clock speeds to a whopping 1100MHz core clock and 1650MHz memory which makes it the fastest retail 7970 on the market.
Not leaving it just with the speeds, they have also given it the full ROG treatment with a triple slot cooler and custom PCB allowing for some extra added features including voltage controls direct on the board, VGA Hotwire, 100% fan boost turbo button and much more for the extreme overclockers out there.
This in all is a mammoth of a card and we haven’t even scratched the surface of what it’s all about so lets get into it in full eTeknix form by going through the box and packaging, the included accessories and then taking a look at this beast of a card. Once this is out of the way, we can focus on the out of box performance that this card offers and how it compares in the market. Then its out turn to see how far it can be pushed through overclocking. Get a cuppa and put your feet up as this is going to be a long ride.
Yeah it’s a beast alright but I’ve never understood the logic of buying something like this. I can understand the logic of buying a Ferrari because that’ll retain it’s worth & even increase in value long after production ceases, but a computer part? In a couple of months when Tahiti becomes obsolete the card is worth a fraction of what it cost & nobody is interested in it any more. Only people (and there’s probably too many of them) with too much money & not enough smarts would spring for it.
I agree man it’s better off to buy a 670 or 680 than this card.
A 670 I see, but a 680 is the same price as this card…. while being slower and not overclocking as well, so eh if you’re a green fan that much lol.
In this article they post benchmarks where 680 is pretty much the same and then they say what their maximum overclock was but they don’t post any numbers for the OC? Pretty weird that they didn’t do any benches with it overclocked.
Would you like us to at least run 3DMark 11 to show the performance increase from now on?
That would be great if you can do that in future. Clock speeds are impressive but sometimes hard to gauge how much they will reflect in real world performance. Thanks guys.
not 3dmark, heaven, bf3, maybe sleeping dogs or witcher2 with ubersampling
basically something with an fps counter to examine the OC numbers
you buy ferraris with the intention of selling them? that’s faulty, what if you have an accident or the specific model for some reason has a defect that nobody wants
i buy things for myself for my usage for life, you make your own worth (& it’s not like they make so many of these to get tons of sales, only specific people would want it)
& how the heck is something obsolete, not everyone buys the biggest fanciest card per generation, some people do every 2 or 3 or 4 generations, so the super card is just fine at surviving all those years, hardly obsolete…
does this card support
GIGABYTE GA-Z68X-UD3H-B3 LGA 1155 Intel Z68 HDMI SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 ATX Intel Motherboard ?