Asus Matrix Platinum GTX 580 1.5GB Review

1. Introduction2. Asus GTX 580 Matrix Platinum 1.5GB3. Asus Matrix Platinum GTX580 (Gallery)4. Testing Methodology5. Synthetic: Unigine Heaven Benchmark6. Synthetic: 3DMark Vantage7. Synthetic: 3DMark 118. Synthetic: Stone Giant9. Synthetic: Shader Toy Mark10. Image Quality: HQV Benchmark 2.011. Gaming Resident Evil 512. Gaming: Alien V Predator13. Gaming: Far Cry 214. Gaming: Mafia 215. Gaming: Lost Planet 216. Gaming: Dead Space 217. Gaming: Total War Shogun 218. Gaming: Metro 203319. Gaming: Dirt 320. Gaming: STALKER Clear Sky21. Gaming: Battlefield Bad Company 222. Gaming: Tom Clancy HAWX 223. Technical: Acoustics Performance24. Technical: Thermal Dynamics25. Technical; Power Consumption26. Technical: Overclocking27. Closing Thoughts28. View All Pages

The Asus Matrix Platinum GTX 580 arrives in a motherboard sized box, finished with traditional ROG artwork.

The box opens out, highlighting the main selling points of the card listed on one panel. The card is visible through a window on the other section of the packaging.

Our bundle included several power converter cables, an SLI connector, and a video converter. There is also a software disc included.

The GTX 580 Matrix Platinum is a monster, 3 slot card with a dual fan heatsink. As the image above shows, the rear is covered with a metal plate, this protects the components underneath and also helps to transfer heat.

The card requires two 8 pin PCI power connectors to operate. This indicates a potential demand for up to 375 watts of power.

No, the red button isn't a self destruct option, it is used to switch the fan speed to 100%, then back to automatically controlled speeds. This will help overclockers quickly adjust the cooling to maximum when needed for testing. The plus and minus buttons underneath are used to change the operating voltage outside of software controls. 12.5 mV can be added to the hardware based voltage regulation circuitry. No software is needed for these to work.

The card has two DVI ports, a full sized HDMI (1.4a) port to the left and a full sized Displayport (1.2 compliant). No need for converters with this board. Two displays can be active at once, a limitation of Nvidia's hardware right now. It can support 2, 3 and 4 way SLI configurations (if your case can handle them all!). There is a safe mode button here which returns the card immediately to reference speeds, and the default bios configuration.

As this is a card specifically tailored to the overclocking audience, there are measuring locations on the bottom right of the PCB to get access to voltage measurements. Asus also include solder points which can be bridged or linked to a 0 ohm resistor to activate additional options.

• Disable OCP – disables overheat protection and also negates overcurrent protection. Risky.
• PEXVDD – to increase PLL voltage
• FBDDO – is used to increase memory voltage
• Power PWM Freq – will double the voltage regulator clock frequency from 250 khz to 500 khz

The cooler is attached to the card with two headers.

The Direct CU Cooler is a potent design, with five thick heatpipes which make direct contact with the GPU core. The heatpipes link into two seperate racks of aluminum fins on either side of the core.

Asus have included a dedicated cooling array for the regulation circuitry, it is directly below the airflow of the fan above. The safe mode button is connected to a header on the custom PCB design to reset all the changes to default settings immediately.

Asus are using Samsung GDDR5 – K4G10325FE-HC04. This memory is rated to a maximum of 1250mhz, or 5GBps effective.

An overview of the hardware in the latest version of GPUz.

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