ASUS HD 5870 Matrix 2GB & ASUS HD 5870 "V2" Sneak Peek

Every day we here at Hardware Canucks receive countless news bulletins, press releases and bit of information about upcoming products. Some of these make it onto our front page News Section while others are sometimes looked at and deemed uninteresting to our reader base. However, once in a while we get information from a manufacturer that warrants a special, dedicated, multi-page post and this is one of them.

We all know that ATI’s board partners have been relatively fast to release custom versions of their HD 5000 series cards but very few have featured what could be called praise-worth clock speed increases. It seems like aftermarket cooling solutions are par for the course these days particularly on the HD 5800 products but better cooling won’t increase out of box performance. This will soon be changing as ATI gears up for the impending launch of NVIDIA’s GTX 480 and GTX 470 by loosening the reins on their partners’ designs. Some truly awe-inspiring products are almost upon us along with Gigabyte’s HD 5870 Super Overclock, one of those is the ASUS HD 5870 Matrix.

A few hours ago, ASUS sent us some long-awaited information regarding the newest addition to their Republic of Gamers graphics card line and while we still don’t have a total understanding of actual performance, a clearer picture is beginning to emerge. Basically, this will be the top of the line HD 5870 series card from ASUS for the time being and it definitely has some specifications to back up its RoG status. Its core will supposedly operate between 890Mhz to 900Mhz (though changes may be implemented depending on GPU binning) while the memory will retain stock frequencies of 4.8Gbps (4800Mhz). For those of you already moaning at the lack of pre-overclocked GDDR5, all is not lost since ASUS has maintained the reference frequencies even though they have bumped the overall amount to 2GB. Many have been claiming that ATI’s HD 5870 has been held back somewhat by its 1GB frame buffer so it will be interesting to see what effect this has on performance.

In the following pages, we will be showing you some pictures which ASUS sent us today as well as shedding some light on the HD 5870 Matrix’s features. We will also be opening the door on another ASUS card: a custom-built HD 5870 that ASUS will be using as they phase out the reference design. You can treat this as a preview, pictorial overview or whatever else you want but we thought our readers would like to get some additional information about this card and what it has to offer. So without further ado, let’s see what this thing looks like.