14 DAY TRIAL // World’s largest computer motherboard manufacturer, Taiwanese company ASUS has just announced the new Matrix Radeon HD 7970 video cards. Yes, you got that right, there are not one, but two of them waiting for you on shelves.
The ASUS Matrix AMD Radeon HD 7970 video cards are GHz Edition models and come with AMD’s new Power Tune technology that will automatically overclock your GPU depending on the computing load, temperature and power consumption.
The base model has the 4.3 billion transistors Tahiti GPU clocked at 1000 MHz when working in default 3D mode, but Power Tune will automatically clock it at 1050 MHz if the temperature allows it and the game demands it.
What’s very interesting about both ASUS’ Matrix Radeon HD 7970 video cards is the GDDR5 memory that’s not running at 5500 MHz effective frequency like it used to on regular HD 7970 cards and nor is it running at 6000 MHz like on reference GHz Edition products.
Both ASUS’ Matrix Radeon HD 7970 video cards are clocked at an impressive 6600 MHz and that’s 10% faster than almost all Nvidia GTX 680 video cards and all AMD’s Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition graphics adapters.
This is important as, in our days, pre-overclocked GDDR5 memory is quite a rare sight and factory overclocks beyond the 6 GHz mark are really hard to find.
Therefore, both ASUS Matrix Radeon HD 7970 video cards have their memory clocked at 6600 MHz right from the box and this is a rare thing indeed.
The most powerful model announced today by ASUS is the Platinum Matrix HD 7970 that has the GPU clocked at a default 1050 MHz with a Turbo option of 1100 MHz.
Both cards have a dual 8-pin power connector configuration and a 20-phase VRM power plane and manual LLC factor control.
The cards ship with ASUS’ famous GPU Tweak and will allow you to feed the GPU up to 1.3V of power for overclocking purposes and also feature a special LN2 mode switch that is very useful when using liquid nitrogen and other extreme cooling techniques.
We expect that this card will break a few benchmarking records for single GPU cards.
There is a second button present and this will set the cooling fans at 100% speed and won’t let the fan software control interfere.
One very impressive aspect of the new cards is the rather unexpected $490 (380 EUR) starting price tag.
Here are the first performace numbers on these cards.
ASUS Matrix HD 7970 Platinum Trounches Nvidia GTX 680
