Asus' latest: Glowy, showy and blowy.
When it was first released (now quite a long time ago), the GTX280 was an impressive bear of a card; ready to maul the face of the competition, with a touch of lemon to make it sting. The GTX285 was a slimmed-down version of very much the same beast, identical in its maul-ability and heavyweight punch, but against recent competition it's starting to look more like a teddy bear than a ferocious monster - does the Matrix amount to anything dangerous? The answer is, well, not exactly.
Beating within the heart of the Matrix is a GT200 core manufactured on a 55nm process, packing in 1400 million transistors that bring 240 stream processors as well as a 512-bit wide memory bus to the table, clawing a huge memory bandwidth from the 1GB of GDDR3 thanks to the ultra-wide design. Unfortunately this core has a few drawbacks; apart from being a monolithic design (and therefore requiring a buttload of power, to the tune of 204W), it's also a very large die. At 470mm2 you wouldn't exactly call it svelte, and this directly translates into expense for both NVIDIA and ASUS. Compare the price of this card, at $550, to recent competition at the red team, and you'll see exactly what we mean.
However limited this card is by the technical side of things, it's more than made up for with the design of the card itself. Coated in a glossy black shell, a stylised pattern has been etched into the surface that makes it look very funky. The bright red ROG logo and squirrel-cage fan make you think of it instantly as a gamer's card, but the most showy feature is something you can only barely see at the top of the picture - it comes with a box that lies on the top of the card, filled with different coloured LEDs. Depending on the load that the card is under, it'll glow a cool idle blue and morph to a fiery red colour. Even more interesting is that this lighting doesn't appear to be tied to the temperature of the card, instead changing in unison with particularly intense workloads as shown by a corresponding drop in fps. Definitely for the gamer that has to show off how 1337 they are, if you've got a windowed side-panel you'll get a lightshow every time you game. How much a randomly changing light annoys you is of course up to you.
Unfortunately while this card can glow and look nice, it demands attention in another way - the fan is a bit of a screamer. Idling at a decent 46 degree temperature and an average 58.5dBA, this rises to a toasty 69 degree load at an uncomfortable 74.4dBA. You'll be seeing the fiery red glow and hearing the loud whirring fan; your senses will be mauled from all directions. This mauling wasn't enjoyable (much like being in a head-on collision with the sidewalk), and definitely not something that the expense should give.
Most disappointing about the card is that for the exceptional price you get only average performance, giving playable frames in Crysis and GRID but nothing exceptionally great. Compared to a 5850 that comes in at $200 less, the Matrix is slower across the board and doesn't have support for DX11. The bundle is pretty Spartan too, and while it does come with the capacity to change the memory timings with the overclocking software included, it honestly only matters if you're going under LN2 for the GTX285 record.
Middle-of-the-field performance, a substandard bundle and a price set $250 higher than it should be amounts to a teddy bear with a big growl - but no bite.
Issue: 133 | February, 2012