With the DirectCU II cooler and its 0dB fans, a factory applied overclock, and the renown DIGI+ VRM, we certainly appear to have a beast of a card on our hands here. As far as the ASUS Strix GTX 980 goes, we have all those attractive features, along with several more ASUS exclusive items. With the lower power consumption, great performance, and the affordable price they offer, it’s not difficult to see why these new graphics cards are so popular. The popularity of NVIDIA’s GTX 900 series graphics cards has been quite astounding, and it seems most enthusiasts can’t wait to get their hands on one. Just make sure you have a case that can hold it.Today, we’re going to look at the ASUS Strix GTX 980 graphics card, which currently wears the “flagship” badge of their Maxwell based GPU offerings. If money’s no object, you’re going to get a hell of a high performance card, no tuning required. Then again, you’re also paying for the convenience of this thing totally cruising out of the box. At $720, it’s priced at a premium over most 980 Tis the EVGA card is only $650, and some of the Matrix’s features won’t mean much for you if you don’t obsess over every percent gained in manual overclocking. The Matrix 980 Ti is begging to be shown off in a flashy case with a window, assuming you dig Asus’s look. And with the side panel off my case, I couldn’t hear either card unless I stuck my head right up to the system. Even overclocked the Matrix hovered around 65C, and while the EVGA card ran much hotter at idle (around 50C with the fans not even running), it only got up to the low 70s under full load. Most impressively, both cards stayed comfortably cool. I managed to add 75 MHz to the GPU clock and 100 MHz to the memory speed on the Matrix, topping 1500 MHz, although the average fps was negligibly higher at 59.8. That upped performance in the Heaven benchmark to an average 58.6 frames per second and a maxed turbo clock speed of 1433 MHz.ĭo you think the Matrix 980 Ti could do better? You bet it could. With about an hour of tinkering, I got the EVGA card to a stable overclock of +100 MHz on the GPU and +400 on the memory, with 56mv of extra voltage. In the Unigine Heaven benchmark, there was a more pronounced difference: 48.8 fps for the EVGA, 56 fps for the Matrix 980 Ti. The Matrix again did a few frames better at 39.6 fps average. In GTA5, the EVGA card turned in an average of 35.9 fps at 1440p with every graphics setting and advanced graphics setting turned all the way up, including 8x MSAA. Storage: Plextor M6e SSD, OCZ Vector 180 SSD Out of the box, the Matrix’s base clock is set at 1190 MHz and it turbos as high as 1317 MHz.Ĭooler: Enermax Liqtech 240 closed-loop liquid ![]() It easily blew past my EVGA 980 Ti SC Gaming ACX 2.0, which is already overclocked at 1102 MHz (that’s 102 MHz faster than the reference card’s GPU) and turbos to 1190 MHz. After spending some time testing the Matrix 980 Ti, I can imagine hardcore overclockers having a field day with this thing. Unlike some oversized aftermarket cards that use all that space for three air coolers, the Matrix 980 Ti sticks with two fans and Asus’ tried-and-true DirectCU II copper heatpipe system. And it’s a massive card by modern Nvidia standards, three slots wide and 11.5 inches long. The Matrix is Asus’s roided out top-end version of the 980 Ti, factory overclocked well beyond the average card with more headroom above that. The Asus Matrix 980 Ti doesn’t just say “look at me: I’m worth a lot of money.” It screams it while flexing the graphics card equivalent of its biceps so hard it threatens to rip its shirt.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |