Asus GTX285 MATRIX

Hi! I'm Andy, andrew8200m of the bit-tech community forums. During the blistering heat that we british rarely get to experience of late August 2009 I attended the Asus Xtreme Global Summit in our countries capital city London along with 18 other lucky readers as fortunate as myself who won the opportunity to attend. Unfortunately there was one chap that missed out on the event due to an unfortunate event but I believe the fine chaps at bit-tech managed to ship over the goodies he would otherwise have left the event with so a big thumbs up to those guys!

Anyway, in the first of my many blog entries to come I am going to talk about Asus' attempt at reinventing what was at the time the fastest single GPU in existence. This was my chosen prize from the event and I can tell you now I sure am glad I picked this up, it's an absolute beast!

Arriving home later that same evening I attended the event I set about examining my brilliant new toy. Even from the word "GO" I could tell I was in for a treat as the cards packaging was exceptional. The box was very well thought out in design and it screamed out exclusive. It is very rare that you get such attention to detail with any products packaging so this was a very nice surprise.

Inside the box I found the usual driver CD's and manuals etc with all the accessories you could wish for however there was one accessory that caught my eye... A CD wallet! A deep mahogany leather wallet to collect and store all of those valuable media discs you rely on, on a day to day basis with your PC. Branded with "ASUS" and surrounded by a delicate beige stitching, I was in awe! Fabulous I thought without realising how camp this wallet really was until a good friend pointed it out to me. I soon retired it to the filing cabinet to avoid any further embarrassment from any other friends that may feel the need to take the proverbial! Between you out there and myself, its actually in a draw hidden as it really is too good to just throw away. Big plus there Asus as I feel you have out done yourself with the extras here.

The graphics card I must say is absolutely beautiful. The attention to detail that must have gone into designing the cooler must have been truly epic! It screams quality from every angle from the RoG logo on the face to the "MATRIX" logo on the side. This "MATRIX" logo also very cleverly shows the activity of the card with different back lit colours signifying different levels of stress exerted on the card. How this may be of use in real world testing is some what beyond me but I am sure to many it has a purpose. The DVI ports and other connectors on the card have covers protecting them during shipping. This means the card does not need to be in an anti-static bag which I felt was a massive bonus as it provided the means for Asus to present the card in its box as they did. Its the small things like this that can make or break a product (literally) and it only elevates the thought that Asus put into the card even more so.

Installation, Overclocking and Benching.

With any new GPU its worth removing all old drivers prior to installing the new card even if the drivers you are going to use are the same as what you will be re-installing. So before I got to installing this card I had to remove my other cards, a pair of ASUS GTX295s in quad sli. To a certain extent I suppose it makes no sense for me to remove my kit however with any new toy I just had to give it a go. Installation was as easy as any other card, simply a case of popping it in and plugging in the power. When I had done this I booted up the pc and set about installing the drivers. I used the drivers provided on the disc as they contained the voltage adjustment software as a package install. My first impressions of the card were that it was very quiet and also very well behaved, something the gtx295s were not. With any new card I immediately ran 3dm Vantage. To my surprise I managed a GPU score of just over 15k. That's almost as fast as a 4870x2!!! For those of you who do not really know much about benching, 3dm Vantage is not really an accurate representation of what a graphics card can do and as such basing a cards speed on this test is in its self pointless. After this first run I decided to tweak the clocks and voltages to see how far the card could be pushed. At stock the card is clocked at 662/1476/2484. The cards architecture remains identical to a standard model except for a revised cooler and pcb. At first I didn't have much luck overclocking the card getting only 742/1612/2696 but with the help of a yate loon DS12H I got the card up to 846/1822/2884!!! At these speeds the card was far from stable in games but could manage a loop of vantage achieving a very respectable GPU score of 18432!!! So far I must admit I was very impressed with the power that this card was delivering and if it could manage my games at the resolution I wanted with the details set to what I wanted the GTX295s were going to be made redundant.

Gaming.

Most games do not really need any more power than a gtx260 or a 4870 to be able to game at a reasonable resolution in high detail settings so with this in mind I figured I would test this new card with GRID and with Crysis. The reason for my choice of games in my eyes was simple. GRID needs to be fluid with as little stuttering as possible as its a game of the racing variety. Crysis is quite probably the most demanding game ever created so I thought it was only fitting that I used it.

GRID

First of system specs.

6gb of ddr3 running at 1880 cl8.

920 D0 at 4.7ghz (235x20)

EVGA classified.

Samsung F1

Vista 64bit sp2

Stock GPU

I immediately set the game to run at 2560x1600 with 4AA and everything maxed out to see if the MATRIX could hold its own against my previous graphics set up.

To my surprise I found that at this resolution and settings the game was almost playable with frames wandering from the very high teens to the low twenties. This is by no means quick but a fantastic achievement for a single GPU that left me feeling pleasantly surprised.

GPU overclocked to 794/1722/2788.

I ran the game in the exact same settings here but unfortunately found that the minimum and average frames rose by only 2 and 3 respectively. Not what I would call brilliant but a good 10% increase in performance none the less.

CRYSIS

The system here remained the same as above.

Stock GPU.

Here I decided to run the game in dx10 mode using "very high" settings and 4AA @ 1920x1200. I ran a quick loop with a few cheats enabled to ensure I wouldn't die nor run out of ammo and set about blowing things up.

At this resolution and these settings the GTX285 did struggle a little with a minimum frame rate of just 12 and an average of 24. Not what you would call playable but then again there is no GPU in existence that can play the game with these settings without falling over its self whimpering. For this reason alone I figured the results were rather positive.

GPU overclocked to 794/1722/2788.

I ran the same settings here and had a play around blowing things up again to see how it coped now. To my surprise I soon developed a rather large grin as the minimum frames leapt up to 19 and the average increased to a playable 27. This still isn't what you would call playable but if you dropped the AA I'm sure you could just about run everything else as it is without issue. RESULT!

Opinion??

My final opinion of this card was rather good and I would be more than happy to keep this in my system as the main GPU if I didn't have my other cards. It's very very fast for what it is and when you consider that this is a single GPU with roughly 3x less power than a GTX295 sli setup it definitely can hold its own! I am more than pleased with the results of this card and can recommend it to anyone.

At present I have this in my machine with the 295s acting as a dedicated physx card. Some of you may think this is a waste but I can assure you it is not. The extra horse power this has added to my gaming when playing games that support physx is immense. It relieves the pressure of my GTX295s leaving them to do what they do best and I couldn't be happier.

I would like to thank bit-tech, custompc and ASUS for the card and especially ASUS for creating and absolute master piece bettering an already proven design by a country mile!

Andy