Asus Matrix HD 7970 Platinum 3GB Graphics Card Review

With the exception of the custom 7990 range of graphics cards that AMD partners have been developing, the most powerful official AMD Radeon graphics card is still the 7970 which competes with the Nvidia GeForce GTX 680 and utilises a powerful single core Tahiti GPU as well as some out of this world specs but some brands aren’t content on leaving it like this and want to put their own spin on things, and we’ve seen this many times before, mainly from Asus, and today is no different.

Today we find the Matrix HD 7970 Platinum card landed in our offices and from what we know about Matrix Platinum cards in the past, they aren’t a force to be reckoned with so this should be no different. Asus have taken a 7970 design and completely changed it by increasing the clock speeds to a whopping 1100MHz core clock and 1650MHz memory which makes it the fastest retail 7970 on the market.

Not leaving it just with the speeds, they have also given it the full ROG treatment with a triple slot cooler and custom PCB allowing for some extra added features including voltage controls direct on the board, VGA Hotwire, 100% fan boost turbo button and much more for the extreme overclockers out there.

This in all is a mammoth of a card and we haven’t even scratched the surface of what it’s all about so lets get into it in full eTeknix form by going through the box and packaging, the included accessories and then taking a look at this beast of a card. Once this is out of the way, we can focus on the out of box performance that this card offers and how it compares in the market. Then its out turn to see how far it can be pushed through overclocking. Get a cuppa and put your feet up as this is going to be a long ride.