Asus Matrix HD7970 Platinum Graphics Card Review

1. Introduction2. Asus Matrix HD7970 Platinum3. Asus Matrix HD7970 Platinum (Super High Res Gallery)4. Testing Methodology5. Synthetic: Unigine Heaven Benchmark6. Synthetic: 3DMark Vantage7. Synthetic: 3DMark 118. Image Quality: HQV Benchmark 2.09. Gaming: F1 2011 (1080p)10. Gaming: Alien V Predator (1080p)11. Gaming: Tom Clancy HAWX 2 (1080p)12. Gaming: Resident Evil 5 (1080p)13. Gaming: Far Cry 2 (1200p)14. Gaming: Total War Shogun 215. Gaming: Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim (1600p)16. Gaming: Battlefield 3 (1080p)17. Gaming: Dirt ShowDown (5760x1080)18. Gaming: Battlefield 3 (5760x1080)19. Gaming: Max Payne 3 (5760x1080) DX1120. Technical: Thermal Dynamics21. Technical: Acoustics Performance22. Technical: Power Consumption23. Technical: Overclocking24. Closing Thoughts25. View All Pages

When it comes to creating a high end graphics card, very few companies can match Asus. Today we are looking at their new Matrix HD7970 Platinum graphics card, which features a hefty metal, dual fan cooler and out of the box overclocked settings. This card uses a 20 phase VRM which takes power from two 8 pin PCIe power connectors. The VRM features a sophisticated load line calibration system with manual LLC factor control which helps counter V-Droop. Is this the ultimate HD7970? Can it take the crown from the class leading Sapphire HD7970 6GB Toxic Edition which we reviewed several months ago?

The Asus Matrix HD7970 Platinum is designed for the hard core overclocking audience, including that small audience who want to use Liquid Nitrogen to push the hardware to the limits. The PCB features an LN2 model switch which loads an extreme cooling optimised BIOS. The company also include a LN2 optimised VRM heatsink in the package.

There is also a fan override button on the board which increases fan speed to 100%, bypassing any software interference.

The board also features VGA Hotwire, these are labelled points on the PCB which allow the user to equip the card with manual voltage tuning circuitry. This card is closely tied into a special version of GPU tweak, which is supplied on the optical disc in the package. The card is equipped with a whopping triple slot cooler which is designed in traditional ‘Republic Of Gamers' colours.

Product	AMD HD7970 GHZ Ed Asus Matrix HD7970 Platinum Graphics Card	AMD HD7950	AMD HD7870	AMD HD7850
Core Clock speed	1050mhz (1100mhz)	800mhz	1000mhz	860mhz
Transistors	4.31 billion	4.31 billion	2.8 billion	2.8 billion
Stream Processors	2,048	1,792	1,280	1,024
Compute Performance	3.79 TFLOPS	2.87 TFLOPS	2.56 TFLOPS	1.76 TFLOPS
Texture Units	128	112	80	64
Texture Fillrate	134.4 GT/s 140.8 GT/s	89.6 GT/s	80 GT/s	55.0 GT/s
ROPs	32	32	32	32
Pixel Fillrate	33.6 GP/s 35.2 GP/s	25.6 GP/s	32.0 GP/s	27.52 GP/s
Z/Stencil	128	128	128	128
Memory Type	3GB GDDR5	3GB GDDR5	2GB GDDR5	2GB GDDR5
Memory Clock	1,500mhz (1,650mhz)	1,250mhz	1,200mhz	1,200mhz
Memory Data Rate	6 GBps (6.6Gbps)	5.0 Gbps	4.8 Gbps	4.8 Gbps
Memory Bandwidth	288 GB/s (316.8GB/s)	240 GB/s	153.6 GB/s	153.6 GB/s

ASUS have overclocked the Asus Matrix HD7970 Platinum to 1,100mhz (boost clock). This is considerably slower than the 1,200mhz ‘Lethal Boost' setting available on the Sapphire HD7970 6GB Toxic Edition.

Unlike Sapphire however, Asus have decided to cut the cost a little by holding true to AMD’s reference specifications, incorporating 3GB of GDDR5 memory, not 6GB. Asus have overclocked the 3GB of GDDR5 on this board to 1,650mhz (6.6Gbps effective).

The ‘Non' Platinum version of this card is clocked at a 1050mhz boost clock speed.

The Asus Matrix HD7970 Platinum arrives in a predominately red box which features Republic Of Gamers artwork. No high resolution picture of the card on the front of the box however.

The box is a gatefold design which opens up to expose the Asus Matrix HD7970 Platinum in all its glory. There are a list of key specifications on the other side of the box, some of which we discussed on the previous page.

Inside the box is a very strong bundle, featuring a Crossfire cable, video and power converter cables, an ASUS chassis sticker, software/driver disc and a VRM heatsink specifically designed for liquid nitrogen overclocking. ASUS also bundle a soft, small Diablo III mousemat.

The Matrix HD7970 Platinum graphics card is a beast. It is a triple slot cooler design with a backplate on the PCB to help improve cooling efficiency. The Asus branded twin fans are set above the heatsink.

The Asus Matrix HD7970 Platinum is Crossfire capable in 2, 3 and 4 way configurations.

It demands power from two 8 Pin PCI E power cables. In theory this card could demand up to 375W of power.

In their literature ASUS claim this card is 2.6 slots, but in the real world that means 3 slots. It measures 11 inch x 5.1 inch x 2.1 inch.

On the rear of the card are two DVI ports and 4 Displayports – it is fully EyeFinity capable.

Unless you are trying to break records, the cooler takes around 10 minutes to remove carefully. There are plates on both the rear and front of the PCB. These are removed with screws on both the underside of the card and on the I/O panel at the back. The backplate has little rubber spacers glued to each screw hole to ensure that the plate does not make direct contact with the PCB.

The front plate is removed with the screws, and underneath are thermal pads which help reduce the temperatures of the memory and VRM's scattered across the board.

The PCB has three buttons – one for safe posting, and the others to decrease and increase the voltage. There is a red button close by which is used to maximise the fan speeds, outside software control. This particular board uses high grade Hynix GDDR5 memory.

The Matrix HD7970 has a huge 20 phase power delivery system, which helps ensure stability at high overclocked speeds. ASUS are using hardened Super Allow Power Capacitors, chokes and MOSFETs. This should help increase board life and eliminate choke buzzing noise.

The cooler comprises five thick 8mm heatpipes, two of which bend back on themselves into one rack of aluminum fins. The other three are arranged in parallel to disperse as much heat as possible from the copper core block offset to the left.

There are two fan headers on the Asus Matrix HD7970 Platinum which attach to individual ports on the card. If you take the card apart be sure to make sure they are both attached.

An overview of the Asus Matrix HD7970 Platinum in GPUz. As discussed earlier, the Tahiti core is based on the 28nm manufacturing process and comprises 4.31 billion transistors. The 3GB of GDDR5 is connected via a wide 384 bit memory interface. The core is overclocked to 1,100mhz and the memory to 1,650mhz (6.6Gbps effective). The card has dual geometry engines, eight render back ends, 2048 unified shaders, 32 color ROPs per clock and 128 Z/stencil ROPs per clock. A powerful card and AMD's current flagship model.

On this page we present some super high resolution images of the product taken with the 24.5MP Nikon D3X camera and 24-70mm ED lens. These will take much longer to open due to the dimensions, especially on slower connections. If you use these pictures on another site or publication, please credit Kitguru.net as the owner/source. You can right click and ‘save as’ to your computer to view later.

To test today we are using our long standing Core i7 970 system, which is overclocked. We have a variety of hardware benchmarked on this system this year which will make for an interesting market comparison.

Main Test System:

Processor: Core i7 970 @ 4.6ghz
Graphics: Asus Matrix HD7970 Platinum (1100mhz core/1650mhz memory)
Cooling: Coolit Vantage
Motherboard: MSI X58A-GD65
Chassis: Thermaltake Level 10 GT
Power Supply: Corsair AX1200
Memory: 6GB ADATA @ 2133mhz 9-10-9-32
Storage: Kingston SSDNow V+ 512GB Gen 2 SSD (Storage) / Crucial RealSSD C300 256GB (OS boot)
Monitor: Dell U3011.

We also change the system later in the review to test Eyefinity across three 24 inch screens.

Ultra High End System (For 3 screen testing):

Processor: Core i7 3960 X Extreme Edition @ 4.6ghz
Cooler: Antec 920 H20
Memory: 16GB G.Skill 2,400mhz @ 10-11-10-30
Motherboard: Asus Rampage IV Extreme
Power Supply: Enermax Platimax 1200W
Optical Drive: Asus BluRay Drive
Chassis: Lian Li PC-A77FR Aluminium Red Full Tower Case
Boot Drive: Patriot WildFire 120GB
Secondary Drive: 1TB Samsung
Monitors: Dell U2410 x 3.

Comparison Cards:
KFA2 GTX680 LTD OC
Asus GTX680
Asus GTX670 Direct CU II TOP
HIS 7970 X Turbo 3GB IceQ X2 (1180mhz core)
Sapphire HD7970 6GB Toxic Edition (1200mhz core)
HD7970 GHZ Edition
HD7970
MSI R7950 Twin Frozr III 3GD5/OC
HD7950
Sapphire HD7870 Overclock Edition
HD7870
HD7850
HD6990 (880 core)
HD6970
HD6950
HD6870
Sapphire HD7770 Vapor X Overclock Edition
XFX HD7770 Black Edition S CFx
HD7770 CFx
HD7770
Sapphire HD7750 Ultimate Edition
HD6790
HD6770
GTX590 SLi
GTX590
GTX580 SLi
GTX580
GTX570

Software:

Windows 7 Enterprise 64 bit
Unigine Heaven Benchmark
3DMark Vantage
3DMark 11
Fraps Professional
Steam Client
FurMark

Games:

Alien V Predator
Tom Clancy HAWX 2
Resident Evil 5
Far Cry 2
F1 2011
Total War: Shogun 2
Battlefield 3
Elder Scrolls V: SkyRim
Dirt Showdown
Max Payne 3

All the latest BIOS updates and drivers are used during testing. We perform generally under real world conditions, meaning KitGuru tests games across five closely matched runs and then average out the results to get an accurate median figure. If we use scripted benchmarks, they are mentioned on the relevant page.

Some game descriptions are edited from Wikipedia.

Unigine provides an interesting way to test hardware. It can be easily adapted to various projects due to its elaborated software design and flexible toolset. A lot of their customers claim that they have never seen such extremely-effective code, which is so easy to understand.

Heaven Benchmark is a DirectX 11 GPU benchmark based on advanced Unigine engine from Unigine Corp. It reveals the enchanting magic of floating islands with a tiny village hidden in the cloudy skies. Interactive mode provides emerging experience of exploring the intricate world of steampunk.

Efficient and well-architected framework makes Unigine highly scalable:

• Multiple API (DirectX 9 / DirectX 10 / DirectX 11 / OpenGL) render
• Cross-platform: MS Windows (XP, Vista, Windows 7) / Linux
• Full support of 32bit and 64bit systems
• Multicore CPU support
• Little / big endian support (ready for game consoles)
• Powerful C++ API
• Comprehensive performance profiling system
• Flexible XML-based data structures

We use the following settings: 1920×1080 resolution. Anti Aliasing off. Anisotrophy 4, Tessellation normal. Shaders High. Stereo 3D disabled. API: Direct X 11

The performance from the Asus Matrix HD7970 Platinum is very strong, averaging 93.7 frames per second. It is around 6 frames slower than the Sapphire HD7970 6GB Toxic Edition when the lethal boost switch is enabled (1,200mhz core).

Futuremark released 3DMark Vantage, on April 28, 2008. It is a benchmark based upon DirectX 10, and therefore will only run under Windows Vista (Service Pack 1 is stated as a requirement) and Windows 7. This is the first edition where the feature-restricted, free of charge version could not be used any number of times. 1280×1024 resolution was used with performance settings.

A good score and much as we would expect at the 1,100mhz core clock setting, scoring 34,763 points. This is around 1,900 points behind the Sapphire HD7970 6GB Toxic Edition with the Lethal Boost switch enabled.

3DMark 11 is designed for testing DirectX 11 hardware running on Windows 7 and Windows Vista the benchmark includes six all new benchmark tests that make extensive use of all the new features in DirectX 11 including tessellation, compute shaders and multi-threading.

After running the tests 3DMark gives your system a score with larger numbers indicating better performance. Trusted by gamers worldwide to give accurate and unbiased results, 3DMark 11 is the best way to test DirectX 11 under game-like loads.

If you want to learn more about this benchmark, or to buy it yourself, head over to this page.

The Asus Matrix HD7970 Platinum scores 9,120 points, around 600 points less than the Sapphire HD7970 6GB Toxic Edition with Lethal Boost enabled.

HQV Benchmark 2.0 is an updated version of the original tool and it consists of various video clips and test patterns which are designed to evalute motion correction, de-interlacing, decoding, noise reduction, detail enhancement and film cadence detection.

There are two versions of the program, standard definition on DVD and high definition on Bluray. As our audience will be concentrating on HD content so will we.

This has a total of 39 video tests which is increased from 23 in the original and the scoring is also up from a total of 130 to 210. As hardware and software gets more complicated, the software has been tuned to make sure we can thoroughly maximise our analysis.

Read our initial analysis over here

	Asus Matrix HD7970 Platinum
Dial	4
Dial with static pattern	5
Gray Bars	5
Violin	5
Stadium 2:2	5
Stadium 3:2	5
Horizontal Text Scroll	5
Vertical Text Scroll	5
Transition to 3:2 Lock	5
Transition to 2:2 Lock	0
2:2:2:4 24 FPS DVCAM Video	5
2:3:3:2 24 FPS DVCam Video	5
3:2:3:2:2 24 FOS Vari-Speed	5
5:5 FPS Animation	5
6:4 12 FPS Animation	5
8:7 8 FPS Animation	5
Interlace Chroma Problem (ICP)	5
Chroma Upsampling Error (CUE)	5
Random Noise: Sailboat	5
Random Noise: Flower	5
Random Noise: Sunrise	5
Random Noise: Harbour Night	5
Scrolling Text	5
Roller Coaster	5
Ferris Wheel	5
Bridge Traffic	5
Text Pattern/ Scrolling Text	5
Roller Coaster	5
Ferris Wheel	5
Bridge Traffic	5
Luminance Frequency Bands	5
Chrominance Frequency Bands	5
Vanishing Text	5
Resolution Enhancement	15
Theme Park	5
Driftwood	5
Ferris Wheel	5
Skin Tones	7
Total	196

A score of 196 points is class leading right now, the ideal solution for high definition media playback on a big screen.

F1 2011 is the newest Direct X 11 racing game from industry pioneers CodeMasters. The 2011 Formula One season is the 62nd FIA Formula One season. The original calendar consisted of twenty rounds, including the inaugural running of the Indian Grand Prix before the cancellation of the Bahrain Grand Prix. Pirelli returns to the sport as tyre supplier for all teams, taking over from Bridgestone. Red Bull Racing are the reigning Constructor’s Champions. Red Bull Racing’s Sebastian Vettel is the defending Drivers’ Champion, one of five World Champions appearing on the grid.

No problems powering this engine at these settings, averaging 90 frames per second.

Aliens V Predator has proved to be a big seller since the release and Sega have taken the franchise into new territory after taking it from Sierra. AVP is a Direct X 11 supported title and delivers not only advanced shadow rendering but high quality tessellation for the cards on test today.

To test the cards we used a 1080p resolution with DX11, Texture Quality Very High, MSAA Samples 1, 16 af, ambient occulsion on, shadow complexity high, motion blur on. We use this with most of our graphics card testing so cards are comparable throughout reviews.

The card performs well averaging 113 frames per second, slotting in behind the higher clocked HIS 7970 X Turbo and Sapphire HD7970 6GB Toxic Edition with Lethal boost enabled.

Tom Clancy’s H.A.W.X. 2 is an arcade-style flight action game developed by Ubisoft Romania and published by Ubisoft. After the events of the first game, the H.A.W.X squadron is sent to Middle East, where a high level of violence is being registered, and the appearance of various insurgents leaders in various hotspots. The team also has to investigate the mysterious disappearance of Russian nuclear weapons. The player will be controlling three groups: one American (Hunter), one British (Munro) and one Russian (Sokov), each with its own pilots and supporting characters. There will also be references to other characters in the Tom Clancy universe.

We are testing in full DX11 mode with all settings to maximum.

No problems powering this engine, averaging 132 frames per second.

Resident Evil 5, known in Japan as Biohazard 5, is a survival horror third-person shooter video game developed and published by Capcom. The game is the seventh installment in the Resident Evil survival horror series, and was released on March 5, 2009 in Japan and on March 13, 2009 in North America and Europe for the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360. A Windows version of the game was released on September 15, 2009 in North America, September 17 in Japan and September 18 in Europe. Resident Evil 5 revolves around Chris Redfield and Sheva Alomar as they investigate a terrorist threat in Kijuju, a fictional town in Africa.

Within its first three weeks of release, the game sold over 2 million units worldwide and became the best-selling game of the franchise in the United Kingdom. As of December, 2009, Resident Evil 5 has sold 5.3 million copies worldwide since launch, becoming the best selling Resident Evil game ever made.

Strong performance results, averaging 173 frames per second at these settings.

Far Cry 2 (commonly abbreviated as “FC2 or “fc2″) is an open-ended first-person shooter developed by Ubisoft Montreal and published by Ubisoft. It was released on October 21, 2008 in North America and on October 23, 2008 in Europe and Australia. It was made available on Steam on October 22, 2008. Crytek, the developers of the original game, were not involved in the development of Far Cry 2.

Ubisoft has marketed Far Cry 2 as the true sequel to Far Cry, though the sequel has very few noticeable similarities to the original game. Instead, it features completely new characters and setting, as well as a new style of gameplay that allows the player greater freedom to explore different African landscapes such as deserts, jungles, and savannas. The game takes place in a modern-day East African nation in a state of anarchy and civil war. The player takes control of a mercenary on a lengthy journey to locate and assassinate “The Jackal,” a notorious arms dealer.

Far Cry 2 is still a popular game and the open world environment can be taxing on even the latest hardware available today.

Settings: 1920×1200, D3D10, Disable Artificial Intelligence(No), Full Screen, Anti-Aliasing(8x), VSync(No), Overall Quality(Ultra High), Vegetation(Very High), Shading(Ultra High), Terrain(Ultra High), Geometry(Ultra High), Post FX(High), Texture(Ultra High), Shadow(Ultra High), Ambient(High), Hdr(Yes), Bloom(Yes), Fire(Very High), Physics(Very High), RealTrees(Very High).

The Matrix HD7970 Platinum averages 118 frames per second in this test, a good result.

Shogun 2 is set in 16th-century feudal Japan, in the aftermath of the Ōnin War. The country is fractured into rival clans led by local warlords, each fighting for control. The player takes on the role of one of these warlords, with the goal of dominating other factions and claiming his rule over Japan. The standard edition of the game will feature a total of eight factions (plus a ninth faction for the tutorial), each with a unique starting position and different political and military strengths.

Around 4 frames per second behind the higher clocked HIS 7970 X Turbo IceQ X2. The Sapphire HD7970 6GB Toxic Edition with Lethal Boost takes the top position however, averaging 93 frames per second.

The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim is an action role-playing open world video game developed by Bethesda Game Studios and published by Bethesda Softworks. Skyrim‘s main story revolves around the player character’s efforts to defeat Alduin, a Dragon god who is prophesized to destroy the world. Set two hundred years after Oblivion, the game takes place in the fictional province of Skyrim, upon the continent of Tamriel, and the planet of Nirn. The open world gameplay of the Elder Scrolls series returns in Skyrim; the player can explore the land at will and ignore or postpone the main quest indefinitely. Skyrim has received universal acclaim from critics, selling more than 3.5 million copies within the first 48 hours of release.

Excellent results, averaging 69 frames per second, just in behind the KFA2 GTX680 LTD OC.

According to EA, Battlefield 3 garnered 3 million pre-orders by the day of its release. It is unknown at present whether these figures are worldwide or just for the US. The pre-order total makes it “the biggest first-person shooter launch in EA history”, according to the publisher. The engine is beautiful on the PC and very demanding of the partnering hardware.

The Asus Matrix HD7970 Platinum averages 97 frames per second, around 4 frames slower than the KFA2 GTX680 LTD OC.

Dirt Showdown is the latest title in the franchise from Codemasters, based around the famous Colin McRae racing game series, although it no longer uses his name, since he passed away in 2007.

We enabled the game across three 24 inch screens at 5760×1080 resolution, with the settings shown above.

Dirt Showdown averages 80 frames per second at these high 3 monitor settings, around 6 fps slower than the higher clocked HIS 7970 X Turbo IceQ X2.

According to EA, Battlefield 3 garnered 3 million pre-orders by the day of its release. It is unknown at present whether these figures are worldwide or just for the US. The pre-order total makes it “the biggest first-person shooter launch in EA history”, according to the publisher. The engine is beautiful on the PC and very demanding of the partnering hardware.

We configured the game to run on three 24 inch monitors at 5760×1080.

No problems powering this game at 5760×1080, averaging 77 frames per second and just a little slower than the KFA2 GTX680 LTD OC.

Max Payne 3 is a third-person shooter in which the player assumes the role of its titular character, Max Payne. Max Payne 3 features a similar over-the-shoulder camera as its predecessors, with the addition of a cover mechanic, while also retaining much of the same run-and-gun style of gameplay. Max Payne 3 also marks the return of bullet-time in action sequences, for which the franchise is notable.

In bullet-time it is possible to see every bullet strike an enemy in detail. New to the series is a “Last Stand” mechanic, which gives the player a grace period after losing all health during which time the player may kill the enemy that wounded them in order to continue playing, however this mechanic is only usable if the player has one or more bottles of painkillers in their possession.

For this Max Payne 3 test we set the anti aliasing to 2x and Tessellation to High, enabling Direct X 11. At these settings, the game demanded 1813MB of memory.

The game is perfectly playable at these demanding settings, averaging 38 frames per second at 5760×1080.

The tests were performed in a controlled air conditioned room with temperatures maintained at a constant 24c – a comfortable environment for the majority of people reading this.

Idle temperatures were measured after sitting at the desktop for 30 minutes. Load measurements were acquired by playing Crysis Warhead for 30 minutes and measuring the peak temperature. We also have included Furmark results, recording maximum temperatures throughout a 30 minute stress test. All fan settings were left on automatic.

Performance of this cooler is very impressive when idle, averaging 35c. When loaded, the temperatures rise to 70c when gaming, and 81c when under Furmark's intensive Stress test. These are higher load temperatures than the other highly overclocked HD7970 solutions we have tested in recent months and between 2-4c worse than the Sapphire HD7970 Toxic Edition with Lethal Boost enabled.

We have changed our method of measuring noise levels. We have built a system inside a Lian Li chassis with no case fans and have used a fanless cooler on our CPU. The motherboard is also passively cooled. This gives us a build with almost completely passive cooling and it means we can measure noise of just the graphics card inside the system when we run looped 3dMark tests.

Ambient noise in the room is around 20-25dBa. We measure from a distance of around 1 meter from the closed chassis and 4 foot from the ground to mirror a real world situation.

Why do this? Well this means we can eliminate secondary noise pollution in the test room and concentrate on only the video card. It also brings us slightly closer to industry standards, such as DIN 45635.

KitGuru noise guide
10dBA – Normal Breathing/Rustling Leaves
20-25dBA – Whisper
30dBA – High Quality Computer fan
40dBA – A Bubbling Brook, or a Refridgerator
50dBA – Normal Conversation
60dBA – Laughter
70dBA – Vacuum Cleaner or Hairdryer
80dBA – City Traffic or a Garbage Disposal
90dBA – Motorcycle or Lawnmower
100dBA – MP3 player at maximum output
110dBA – Orchestra
120dBA – Front row rock concert/Jet Engine
130dBA – Threshold of Pain
140dBA – Military Jet takeoff/Gunshot (close range)
160dBA – Instant Perforation of eardrum

The Asus Matrix HD7970 Platinum is the quietest high performance HD7970 we have tested, claiming top spot in the noise test. When gaming it is noticeably quieter than the Sapphire HD7970 Toxic Edition and the HIS 7970 X Turbo IceQ X2. Fan speeds on this card shift between 1,000 rpm when idle, 1,800 rpm when gaming and 2,100 rpm under Furmark load.

We can see by cross referencing the results on this page and the last, that Asus are opted for slightly higher temperatures under load for reduced noise emissions. Its a great trade off.

To test power consumption today we are using a Keithley Integra unit and we measure power consumption from the VGA card inputs, not the system wide drain. We measure results while gaming in Crysis Warhead and record the results.

In such an energy aware climate, AMD are making a big deal out of their new ‘ZeroCore Power’ technology. Many solutions today use power gating, clock gating and memory compression to reduce idle power requirements, but ZeroCore power technology can completely power down the core GPU while the rest of the system remains active.

All of these cards are power hungry high end models, although the Asus Matrix HD7970 Platinum consumes less power under load than both the HIS 7970 X Turbo IceQ X2 and the Sapphire HD7970 6GB Toxic when Lethal Boost is enabled.

For our overclocking tests today we are using the ASUS GPU Tweak software which is supplied on the software disc.

The software allows adjustments to power target, load line and VRM Clock. These need to toggled on within the ‘settings' menu.

We played for a couple of hours with various settings, and found the best results from those in the screenshot above. We managed to overclock the core from 1,100mhz to 1,211 mhz which translates to a 10% increase. The memory peaked at 1,728mhz (6.9Gbps effective), an almost 5% increase.

The healthy overclock translates to a substantial increase in 3DMark 11, with a final score of 9,910 points – just above the Sapphire HD7970 Toxic Edition with Lethal Boost enabled.

Asus are world renowned for their class leading high end graphics cards and the Matrix HD7970 Platinum certainly has some remarkable features which qualify it for Republic Of Gamers status. The build quality of this card is absolutely flawless and matches the incredibly high standards set by Sapphire's HD7970 6GB Toxic Edition, released in July.

ASUS are very late to the game with the Matrix HD7970 Platinum and Sapphire have set such a high benchmark that we can't help but feel a little disappointed.

The Asus board is fully loaded with a substantial check list of overclocking extras. The card uses a 20 phase VRM which takes power from two 8 Pin PCIe power connectors. The company have incorporated a sophisticated load line calibration system with manual LLC factor control to help counter V Droop. It has an LN2 optimised BIOS and a substantial three slot cooling system with cooling plates on both the front and rear side of the PCB.

Why then did they opt for such a modest 1,100mhz core clock speed?

Regular readers will already have read our reviews of the 1,180mhz HIS 7970 X Turbo 3GB IceQ X2 and 1,200mhz Sapphire HD7970 6GB graphics cards, both of which are significantly faster ‘out of the box'.

I can appreciate ASUS catering for the hardcore overclocking audience who use Liquid Nitrogen, but I feel they have neglected the ‘general' high end enthusiast audience. This card should have had the BIOS tweaked to a 1,180mhz-1,200mhz clock speed, putting it in a head to head with the aforementioned market leaders.

The Matrix HD7970 Platinum may be better built than the HIS 7970X Turbo 3GB IceQ X2, but the Sapphire HD7970 6GB Toxic Edition is technically just as impressive.

The Sapphire HD7970 6GB Toxic Edition is louder than the Asus Matrix HD7970 Platinum, but it is also substantially faster, by simply hitting a button on the card which toggles the ‘Lethal Boost' bios.

ASUS don't offer a faster BIOS setting, but instead include a button for 100% fan speed. No gamer will want to run this card with both fans spinning at 100%, and those people who use Liquid Nitrogen will have removed the cooler and fans beforehand. It seems almost redundant in my opinion. The option for a 1,200mhz boost profile would have been a much better inclusion.

There is also the fact that ASUS have used a triple slot Republic of Gamers style Direct CU II cooler. This can make running Crossfire configurations rather difficult, depending on the motherboard. The Sapphire HD7970 6GB Toxic Edition is only dual slot and more compatible in multi card configurations.

In closing, I have no hesitation in recommending the Asus Matrix HD7970 Platinum graphics card. We have no confirmed store links at time of publication, although ASUS have informed us that the retail price will be around £450 inc vat. For £30 extra, I would personally buy the Sapphire HD7970 6GB Toxic Edition, it is faster and physically smaller, with double the onboard memory.

Pros:

• Fantastic build quality.
• Quietest ultra high performance HD7970 we have tested.
• Overclocks well with GPU Tweak.
• frame rate power is without question.
• Good Bundle.

Cons:

• The Sapphire HD7970 Toxic Edition is faster and has double the memory count which can help at 5760×1080+ resolutions.
• ASUS could have aimed for a 1,200mhz ‘out of the box' core clock.
• Triple slot cooler is bulky.

Kitguru says: A fantastic card from ASUS, but the Sapphire HD7970 Toxic Edition with Lethal Boost is still the fastest HD7970 on the market.

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