Asus Matrix HD 7970 Platinum 3GB Graphics Card Review

The first thing you’ll notice with this card, is that it’s actually a beast and you get a first look at how big it truly is. The card features a DirectCUII cooling solution which includes a large twin fan setup which encompasses the whole card. The cooler also includes the ROG colour scheme and of course the ROG logo.

The back of the card features a large metal blackplate which covers the complete PCB, barring a few points of interest, which we’ll talk about further on. The name of the card is also printed across here and plenty of ventilation holes for air circulation are cut into the metal backplate.

Taking a look at the card from a slightly different angle really does show how gargantuan it really is.

We can see that the card requires three slots in your chassis and that the plastic cooler moulds around the heatsink on the top of the card too.

On the underside of the card, we can see the large heatsink and heatpipe design cooler and how the shrouding moulds around it here.

As this card is said to pack a serious punch, we find two 8-pin PCI-Express power connectors on the top-end of the card.

In terms of power, we have a few unique features around the card including VGA Hotwire technology which allows the user to control the cards voltages from your ROG board while in the BIOS. First up is the Hotwire points for controlling the PLL voltage.

Here we find a Hotwire connector for the Vcore voltage and above we find various solder points for extreme enthusiasts who may want to tinker even further. Also we find some voltage monitoring points present.

Hidden away are some other features including a Safe mode button, – button and + button as well as a 100% turbo fan speed button. The + and – buttons allow the user to increase the voltage up and down on the fly ranging from 1.270V to 1.335V. Of course this can be bypassed by other means when using extreme cooling such as LN2, but for the average user this is enough scalability. The safe mode button can be seen as a clear CMOS style button which resets the BIOS on the card incase you push things to far Lastly we have the 100% fan speed turbo button which as the name suggests, simply ramps up the fan speed to 100% for extreme cooling without going down the LN2 route.

Along the top of the card is where we find two CrossFire connectors for those wanting to pair this card with another 7970 for some multi-GPU action.

Just next to the CrossFire connectors we find a dual-BIOS switch which we’ve seen on other 7970 based cards and Asus have decided to keep it on this card.

Lastly finishing things up with the rear I/O, you can see the perspective of how big this mammoth of a card is with its triple slot design. Connectivity wise we find two Dual-link DVI ports and four full-size DisplayPort 1.2 ports. Of course, AMD Eyefinity6 is supported on this card for those wanting to utilise multi-display technology which AMD pride themselves on.

Taking a look at the specs of the card straight out of the box, we can see that Asus have increased the speeds from a stock 7970 from 1050MHz to 1100MHz and the memory speed has increased from 1500MHz to 1650MHz (6.6GHz Effective) on this card.the core clock and 1350MHz on the memory clock (5.4GHz Effective). Other specifications include 3GB of GDDR5 memory running on a 384-bit memory interface.