This Matrix has nothing to do with the movie.
When we were kids, graphical quality didn't seem too important - we'd be as happy playing some ultra-realistic postmodern all-brown wartime sim as we would be if we were playing Super Mario in black and white. Now though we need a little more than a bouncing Italian plumber on a mushroom-fuelled quest for booty - and that's where a graphics card will come into play.
This particular card was provided by the wholly un-plumbing-related ASUS, and sits firmly in its Matrix branded range of black obelisks. There are absolutely no surprises with the tech specs here, running the RV770 PRO core at 625MHz and the memory at 993MHz, both incredibly disappointingly left at stock speeds. Just an aside to the engineers - if you're going to slap a different cooler on a card, at least increase the clocks! Still, the 256-bit memory bus should give us a decent amount of bandwidth out of the 512MB of GDDR3 memory whacked on here, and the PCIe V2 interface will reciprocate this bandwidth to the rest of the system.
Even though this card is running at stock speeds, we see a performance increase over the Palit HD4850 Sonic we looked at back in Issue 94 - this is because the Catalyst drivers have been tweaked enough that roughly five more frames a second are eked out from Crysis. We get the same 3DMark scores we could expect, however. Strangely this card had a little tantrum with GRID, dropping the framerate to zero and rendering it completely unplayable for up to five seconds...after which it'd keep going at the usual average. Through that it'd keep our keystrokes saved up, and comically slam us against the wall much too early or late for the turns - very frustrating!
With temps of 40 degrees idle at 66dBA, and load at 63 and 70dBA this card has a little headroom at least for some overclocking. Heat really isn't too much of a problem here... but the noise certainly is, producing an annoying whining noise that the whole Matrix series shares thanks to a very small squirrel cage fan. Cooling would be much better if the fan had thicker blades and less of them, because right now you can barely feel air moving there at all.
What little air is taken in is spread throughout radial fins that are soldered to a heatpipe. This heatpipe snakes to the core of the card, where it meets two others and they all lie on a copper base. Those other two heatpipes move to just underneath that ASUS logo, where they dissipate the heat in a series of long aluminium fins. These channel the airflow along the length of the card, and straight out to the ventilated PCI bracket. Around all that is a metal shroud to help direct the airflow whose other purpose is to look attractive. Just like Atomic's tech writer *cough*.
Also covered by this heatsink are the memory chips, all eight of them, underneath a shaped piece of anodised aluminium with raised pillars to improve surface area. The PCB is a dark brown colour, and has a single PCIe 6-pin power connection, as well as two Crossfire nipples. You've also got two DVI ports at the back, which is very handy.
Overall this is the kind of card you'd buy for the gamer who didn't really care about noise, didn't want the very best performance (and didn't want to play GRID at all would also be a plus) but instead wanted a card that just looked the part. Being rather funkiful in appearance, the 4850 Matrix does just that.
Issue: 133 | February, 2012