Final thoughts and rating
Lining up squarely against the cheapest GeForce GTX 480s in price, pitched at £400, the ASUS MATRIX 5870/2DIS/2GD5 is the company's attempt to provide suitable competition against the green side of its graphics business.The MATRIX Platinum card is equipped with an in-house-designed heatsink and PCB, outfitted with a generous 2,048MB frame-buffer, and pre-overclocked to 900MHz core. Appreciating the target audience, the two questions that need answering are a) whether it's worth £75 or so above a basic Radeon HD 5870 1,024MB and b) does it compete well against GTX 480 when evaluated from all angles.
Better than the reference HD 5870 in every way other than price, the premium makes sense if you're looking for a future-proof card that will continue to deliver as game engines become more complex. The 2,048MB frame-buffer will come in useful for a three-way Eyefinity setup - full review of different-sized frame-buffers coming up - and the cooler's rather good. All things considered, the ASUS effort is roughly on a par with a similar card from Sapphire.
On average, GeForce GTX 480 is a faster card, as shown by the HEXUS.bang4buck, and readers interested in pure performance would probably be better served by NVIDIA's single-GPU champ, if they can put up with the noisier cooler cooler. Our investigation shows that there is no clear winner when spending £400 on a single card, but we feel that ASUS provides a solid showing with the MATRIX.
The good
Very solid performance in all tests
Reference-beating cooler; quiet under load
Overclocks well
The not so good
£400 brings the faster GeForce GTX 480 into the reckoning
Could do with a bundled game or two
HEXUS Rating
ASUS MATRIX 5870/2DIS/2GD5
HEXUS Awards
ASUS MATRIX 5870/2DIS/2GD5
HEXUS Where2Buy
TBC.
HEXUS Right2Reply
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