ASUS GTX980 Ti Matrix SLI Review

Introduction

No you're not getting confused. Yes this is just a review of the new Matrix card from ASUS in single card and SLI setups. We know there are four cards at the top of the page and so, if you're familiar with our exploits, this rightly should be a Overkill3D review. However, having procured enough cards to buy a small Caribbean island we discovered that the new cooler ASUS have installed on their latest Matrix offering isn't two slots wide but two and a half. It doesn't take a genius to work out that there isn't a motherboard with four PCI Express slots, all of them three slots apart. So we're stuck doing just an SLI review. We know, it's a hard job but someone has to do it.

The second thing that can't have escaped your attention is the rather obvious orange hue to the cards. The ROG brand has finally, after what feels like forever, dispensed with the red and black that has become commonplace and moved to black and orange which, we're sure you'll agree, looks amazing. We'll look at them closer on the next page.

Beyond the width and colour changes the Matrix is everything you would expect to find from the premium model in the ROG range. We have cherry-picked GPUs ensuring the very highest performance and overclocking potential. Fourteen phase Super Alloy power only adds to the overclocking capabilities which are backed up by the DirectCU II cooler and some wing-blade fans.

Technical Specifications

Sometimes we need a word that means stock but isn't. It's why we use 'out of the box' so often. To say a Matrix has some stock speeds is underselling the blistering factory overclock. It's already beyond nearly anything else on the market and that's before the nVidia GPU Boost 2.0 technology has got to work. Or we've fiddled with the ASUS GPU Tweak II software.