Asus GTX980 ROG Matrix Platinum Review

Allan 'Zardon' Campbell January 9, 2015 Featured Announcement, Graphics

The Asus GTX980 ROG Matrix Platinum ships in a box featuring the distinctive Republic Of Gamers colours.

The gatefold style box greets the user with a bunch of technical data and information. It can open to expose the card itself behind a protective plastic sheet. Ideal if you still shop within a physical retail store. Not so useful if you don't (like most of us in 2015 I would imagine).

The card ships protected between thick layers of flexible foam. Accessories include several converter cables, literature on the product, and a fancy little adhesive badge for a case.

The Asus GTX980 ROG Matrix Platinum is a heavy dual slot card, constructed primarily from metal. There is a backplate in place too which will offer additional cooling and protection over sensitive parts of the PCB.

Asus get bonus points for build quality. They have applied a black coating to the heatpipes, so they appear more attractive.

The card ships with a single dual link DVI connector, three DisplayPort connectors and a single HDMI connector. This HDMI port will handle 4K resolutions at up to 60hz. These are all full sized ports which is much better than having to rely on mini converter cables.

The ASUS GTX980 ROG Matrix Platinum takes power from two 8 pin PCI e connectors. These are unfortunately rather fiddly to reach, due to the way Asus have created the PCB and backplate, positioning the headers within the narrower part of the PCB.

The card is fully SLI capable, as we would expect.

The ‘Republic Of Gamers' logo lights up when the card is powered on. Colour states indicate load levels. Blue indicates ‘light' loading. Orange for ‘medium' loading. Red is ‘Heavy' loading. Green indicates ‘safe' mode. A case window seems important, otherwise you wouldn't see this in action at all when using the system.

Asus are using thick 10mm nickel plated heatpipes on the cooler, all of which are coloured black to improve the appearance. Asus have opted to use high grade Samsung GDDR5 memory on the ROG board, which is reassuring to see.

A GPUz overview of the hardware. The GM204 GPU is running at enhanced speeds of 1,241mhz (1,342mhz boost). The memory is set at Nvidia reference speeds of 1,753mhz (7Gbps effective). The card has 2,048 CUDA cores, 64 ROPs and 128 texture units. The 4GB of Samsung GDDR5 is connected via a 256 bit memory interface.