Having been a die hard Asus fan for a good number of years (since the A7N8X) you can imagine the shrieks of joy when I discovered I had won a place at the Asus Extreme Global Summit. In fact my wife thought I was having some kind of seizure when she walked in only to discover me spinning around on my computer chair. Further reading of the email resulted in more un-godly noise when I discovered the possibility of a shiny new graphics card. Having been thinking up Baldric esque cunning plans for a reason to replace my 8800 GTX this saved me having to try (convincingly) telling my wife my trusty GTX had died.

So having left the Summit with a distinct smug look on my face carrying the Asus Matrix 285 GTX and flashing the card on the train with" mine is bigger and better than yours" attitude I feel I should share my thoughts on the card with you. Opening the box I was immediately impressed with the quality of the packaging, not your standard fare by any means. Rather than the usual plastic carton a very posh looking black box greeted me, staring me right in the face was the card itself.

Further delving into the box, which I might add was suprisingly easy to get into, revealed a neat box of accessories complete with swathe looking gold print: Asus - Rock Solid - Heart Touching. Lets hope those words ring true.

Now with every good thing comes something that pokes you in the eye and tells you that you are fat. In my case this was having to dismantle my water cooling loop and staining my carpet purple. Not content with calling me fat, it then proceeded to comment on my bad hair and greasy complexion. In other words total motherboard failure. Yes, you guessed right, that non conductive fluid was more conductive than it would lead you to believe. Unfortunately in my haste to install the card I neglected to see I had spilt some fluid onto my vrm heatsink area.

A new P55 board and I7 860 CPU later it was all systems go and let me tell you it really does go. Gone are the days of thirty minute Ipod movie encodes and stuttering frame rates. Now its five minutes max and silky smooth frame rates all the way.

It was at this point I noticed the shiny Matrix logo on the side of the card had turned from blue to purple. Five minutes of zombie like staring later (yes I was waiting for it to change again) I delved into the dreaded instruction manual to find out about this strange phenomenon. It turns out the logo is actually an indicator of load on the card. A further five minutes of folding and hurling batarangs confirmed that it is actually a pretty good indicator of load.

Its at this point in my matrix adventure I bid you adieu, farewell and goodbye. Until next time.. Skunkmunkey.