ASUS 7970 Matrix Platinum

Introduction

It was back at the turn of the New Year that we first reviewed the HD7970 and we found it to be a stunning comeback from AMD after the rather poor showing of the 6 series cards. Indeed it still stands up well against the GTX680 and is a good choice for anyone who is looking for premium performance.

In fact one of the most impressive aspects of the reference cards we looked at all those months ago was how well they handled an overclock, remaining cool and quiet under the most demanding of tests.

Since then the bods at ASUS have been beavering away throwing every available bell and whistle at the Tahiti XT GPU core and have finally released their take on the top-end single GPU Radeon, the ASUS HD7970 Matrix Platinum.

A triple-slot monster this has everything but the kitchen sink. Has the lengthy gestation and multiple features proven worth the wait?

Technical Specifications

As is always the case with GPUs the main specifications don't tell the full story. The HD7970 Matrix Platinum (hereafter the Matrix) has a decent factory overclock of 175MHz on the core and an effective 1.1GHz GDDR5 when compared to a stock reference card. Otherwise the main point of note is the inclusion of 4 native DisplayPort connections. Even the most hardcore gamer probably only has three displays for Eyefinity, so to say this is a niche feature is understating things.

The final big improvement is in the power phase. Rather than the 12 phase the reference card has the Matrix comes with 20 Phase VRM as well as VRM overclocking and Loadline calibration options.