Conclusion
Conclusion
With a cluttered market staring at them in the face, ASUS really needed to pull a rabbit out of their hats if they had any hope of releasing a card which could differentiate itself from the competition. Their HD 5870 Matrix Platinum Edition has no problem setting itself up as one of the premier cards available on the market by sporting an extremely strong feature set and more than acceptable performance. There are some issues we will get into later but for the most part this card did impress us again and again.
One of the most outstanding aspects of the Matrix is its ability to seamlessly incorporate features that will actually benefit the end user. In this vein, the iTracker software distinguishes itself as one of the best manufacturer-specific monitoring and overclocking tools on the market. Not only is it leaps and bounds better than the anemic Smart Doctor ASUS included with past cards, the control it allows is simply unmatched. With it we were able to take the Matrix to overclocking heights which were jaw dropping.
When it came to performance, the results were often mixed. This is mostly because ASUS chose to keep the core clocks of their flagship product to relatively pedestrian levels even though our sample obviously had a lot left in its tank. We understand that properly binning cores and memory to run at high clock speeds on a retail product isn’t easy but 894Mhz isn’t what we would call class-leading. As such, framerates usually bridged the gap between Gigabyte’s Super Overclock model and a reference product. The 2GB of memory may also seem to be a standout feature but in most cases it is relegated to nothing more than a fancy marketing term with absolutely no performance benefits. There are times however where this extra memory is able to shine (Metro 2033 being one of these cases) and it really has to make us wonder about its possible benefits in upcoming DX11 titles.
No matter which way you cut it, $500 is still a lot of money for what boils down to a HD 5870 with a minor speed increase. This coupled with ASUS’ release of the non-Platinum version that retails for about $30 less makes the price of this particular card a hard sell. We’d go so far as to recommend you seriously look at the non-Platinum edition if it ever becomes widely available.
Another nit we have to pick is clock speeds. Yes, it’s only 6Mhz but while ASUS advertises the Platinum as having a 900Mhz core clock, this isn’t the case. They didn’t advertise it as “almost 900Mhz”, did they? Installing the iTracker software and selecting the “Gaming” mode will give you these mostly pointless 6 extra megahertz yet why this is done is something our reps at ASUS couldn’t answer.
To finish off this conclusion it should be mentioned that there’s no such thing as perfection in our eyes. Several products have come close and the HD 5870 Matrix can easily be counted among them. All of the lessons ASUS has learned through the years seem to have been flawlessly incorporated into this card and it shines as a result. It really is a technological tour de force and while it does have its rough edges, the ASUS HD 5870 Matrix still walks away with our Dam Good Award.
Pros:
- Good performance
- Closed system cooler means hot air exhausted outside the case
- Fail-safe overclocking through iTracker and Safe Mode BIOS reset
- Driver agnostic overclocking profiles saved to BIOS
- Quiet when compared to other custom HD 5870 cards
- Stunning looks
- 2GB of memory can make a difference in some rare cases
Cons:
- Not quite the advertised 900Mhz core speed unless you install ASUS software
- Price
- Low clock speeds when compared to the competition
