Asus ROG Matrix GTX 980Ti Platinum Edition

ASUS Republic Of Gamers artwork is very distinctive and actually a little bland if we are being honest. No images of the card itself on the front either.

The rear of the card goes into some details on the cooling system, with a break down diagram of the card as well on view. ASUS claim ‘18% faster out of the box performance' over a reference solution.

If you happen to stumble upon one of these in a retail store then you can open the box up, gatefold style – just be aware the shop owner will likely be watching you carefully. Asus detail the lighting on the card, the Super Alloy Power ‘Extreme Technology', the cooler, safe mode, and the memory defroster option. They also highlight their custom overclocking and tweaking software called ‘GPU Tweak II'.

The card is shipped inside a heavy duty foam surround to protect against mishandling.

For a flagship card, the bundle is a little light. ASUS include a software disc, literature on the card alongside two power converter cables.

The Asus ROG Matrix GTX 980Ti Platinum Edition is a hefty 2.5 slot design. Two large fans reside inside a metal cooling system – which is effectively coloured silver/grey with orange accenting. It is actually one of the prettiest high end graphics cards that Asus have ever produced. Feel free to disagree.

Asus are using patented ‘Wing-blade' fans. They claim these maximise air flow efficiency with 105% more air pressure. Furthermore, If you pay attention you will see that the thick heatpipes are actually treated with a heat resistant black coating to fit in with the design of the card.

The Asus ROG Matrix GTX 980Ti Platinum Edition is equipped with a branded backplate. We do like to see a quality backplate fitted to a graphics card – it not only helps protect the sensitive PCB components but will drop temperatures specifically on hot spots close to the VRM's and GPU core.

While it might be easy to miss on first glance, the cooler is fitted with a color coded load indicator which you can see in the image above.

The colour system on the cooler has four indicator colours. Blue – Light Loading. Orange – Medium Loading. Red – Heavy Loading. Green – Safe Mode.

The Asus ROG Matrix GTX 980Ti Platinum Edition takes power from two eight pin connectors, as shown above.

One edge of the PCB is home to the SAFE MODE button, and a Molex connector. This Molex connector is only used to supply power to the memory defroster circuit – so in most instances, and unless you have some liquid nitrogen at hand, you won't need to use this.

The card is SLI capable in 2,3 and 4 way configurations.

The ASUS card ships with a single DVI-D port. There are three DisplayPorts 1.2 and a single HDMI 2.0 port along the bottom of the I/O plate. If you wish, you can use all these ports at the same time for triple monitor gaming. HDMI 2.0 is supported, so you are able to get 60hz at 4K resolutions, without the need for any adapters.



The Direct CU II cooling system is formidable, both in size and weight. It is comprised of five thick black heatpipes which lead into two separate racks of aluminum fins – all painted black. Asus are using very high grade SK Hynix GDDR5 memory on this PCB and we hope it will overclock well later in the review.

This graphics card is manufactured via a fully automated production process to ensure maximum reliability.

An overview of the hardware in the latest version of GPUz. This overclocked GM200 core runs at 1,216mhz with a boost speed set at 1,317mhz and is built on the 28nm process. The GTX980 Ti has 96 ROPs, 176 Texture units (Titan X has 192 texture units) and 2,816 CUDA Cores (Titan X has 3,072 CUDA Cores). The 6GB of GDDR5 memory runs at 1800mhz (7.2Gbps effective) and is connected via a 384 bit memory interface.

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