14 DAY TRIAL // Asus has just announced the launch of its highly anticipated Republic of Gamers GTX 580 Matrix graphics card that features a custom PCB design and cooling assembly in order to deliver improved performance and higher overclocking headroom.
The Matrix uses the company's proprietary DirectCU II design, which relies on a series of direct contact heatpipes to draw the heat away from the core and into a massive aluminum heatsink.
This is topped by two high-airflow fans and the whole cooling assembly occupies no less than three PCI slots.
Apart from the redesigned cooling system, the GTX 580 Matrix also features a new PCB design that packs a special 19-phase super alloy PWM.
According to Asus, this can provide more overclocking headroom with a 15% performance boost, while it also reduces the card's temperatures by 35°C and prolongs its lifespan.
All these changes, allowed the Taiwanese company to increase the speed of the GF110 core to 816MHz, while the 1.5GB of GDDR5 memory comes clocked at 1.2GHz (4.8GHz data rate).
Since the GTX 580 Matrix is targeting the enthusiast crowd, Asus also equipped the card with a series of overclocking-oriented features such as on-the-fly fan RPM control and a dual-BIOS design, in case the graphics card fails booting after an OC attempt.
Furthermore, the Matrix will also be shipped together with a new version of the GPU Tweak application, that allows real-time frequency, voltage and fan speed adjustments.
Asus hasn't made public any information regarding the release date, or about the price, of the ROG GTX 580 Matrix.
The Nvidia GeForce GTX 580 is based on the GF110 core and it packs 512 stream processors, 64 texture units, 48 ROP units as well as a 384-bit memory bus. The stock operating clocks of the card are set at 772MHz for the core and 1002MHz for the memory.