ASUS GTX580 MATRIX Review

Geekspeak411 - August 25, 2011
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Testing:

Testing is a huge part of the Matrix GTX580 Platinum's review, as I want to see if the performance justifies the price point. This time around it will mean running the card through the OverclockersClub.com suite of games and synthetic benchmarks. This will test the performance against many popular competitors in order to gauge its performance. The games used are some of today's newest and most popular titles to give you an idea on how the cards perform relative to each other. The system specifications will remain the same throughout the testing. No adjustment will be made to the respective control panels during the testing with the exception of the 3DMark Vantage testing where PhysX is disabled in the NVIDIA Control Panel when applicable. I will test the card at stock speeds and then overclocked to see how much additional performance is available and to determine if it can run with or faster than the current fastest single GPU cards on the market. Of course, all settings are left at defaults in the control panels of each respective manufacturer except where noted. I really want to see just how fast this card can fly!

Processor: Intel Core I7 920 200x18 3.6GHz
Cooling: Noctua NH-U12P SE 1366
Motherboard: ASUS P6T Deluxe OC Palm Edition
Memory: Mushkin 996805 Redline PC312800 6-8-6-24 1600MHz
Video Card: ASUS ENGTX570 DirectCU II Edition
Power Supply: Mushkin 1000 watt Joule Modular power supply
Hard Drive: 1 x Seagate 1TB SATA
Optical Drive: LG DVD-RW
OS: Windows 7 Professional 64-bit
Case: Corsair Graphite 650T

Comparison Video Cards:

Overclocking:

Overclocked Settings:

ASUS Matrix GTX580 Platinum Edition (950/1125)

I want to know if having the extra cooling, features, and premium handpicked GPU is going to give me even a little more than I asked for. Sure the Platinum card comes at an 815MHz factory overclock, but is there more to be had? Time to find out. As always, I begin the overclocking process by setting the fans to 100%, loading up Kombustor, and warming up the GPU. Then normally I would open up a variety of utilities to tweak settings and monitor performance, but here ASUS has already put together the heavy work with the GPU Tweak application suite. Launching the suite I am greeted by a very pleasant step up from the previous SmartDoctor utility that ASUS would bundle, both aesthetically and in function, it would seem. The bulk of the utility is similar in form to MSI's Afterburner utility, albeit in true ROG colors. Afterburner is a popular utility here at OCC so from an organizational standpoint, the design choice is a plus. ASUS also bundles a custom ROG-skinned version of GPU-Z however it has a little issue that I'll go into more depth later. Once I customized the monitor side of the utility and familiarized myself with the tweaking options, I began pushing up the core clock 5MHz every five minutes or so until I lost stability. When the driver crashed, I bumped up the voltage and continued once more. I was able to continue this all the way up to 950MHz, which while not the highest GTX580 overclock, is still a very respectable clock and can be attributed to the individual GPU. I then worked up the memory to a nice overclock and played around to see where I could get the best benchmark numbers. This card is looking to be pretty impressive.

Maximum Clock Speeds:

Each card has been tested for its maximum stable clock speeds using MSI's Kombustor utility. So far my testing has shown that higher clock speeds may be stable in games where GPU usage does not reach 100%, but will crash within a few minutes using this utility. The reported clock speeds are those that proved stable over a 15-minute test at 1920 x 1200, 8x AA.