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.

The front of the box is typical from what you’d expect from a Republic of Gamers product with a red theme and simple branding. We also find that the card comes included with a free Diablo 3 mousepad.


The rear of the packaging gives us the specifications of the card and a few of the main features. It’s also worth noting that this product comes with a 3 year limited warranty.


The front of the box also doubles up as a flap panel which reveals more information on some of the unique features that Asus have invested into this card including TweakIt, GPU Tweak and the DirectCU II cooling solution.



By opening up the flap on the front, it also reveals a first glimpse of the card through a cut-out panel on the box.


Inside we find a setup guide, driver CD, casebadge sticker and the Diablo III mousepad.

Also included is a dual 6-pin PCI-Express to single 8-pin power adapter, a CrossFire bridge, and a VGA to DVI adapter.

For the extremists out there, we also find a LN2 MOSFET heatsink bracket with mounting screws and three VGA Hotwire cables.

The first thing you’ll notice with this card, is that it’s actually a beast and you get a first look at how big it truly is. The card features a DirectCUII cooling solution which includes a large twin fan setup which encompasses the whole card. The cooler also includes the ROG colour scheme and of course the ROG logo.

The back of the card features a large metal blackplate which covers the complete PCB, barring a few points of interest, which we’ll talk about further on. The name of the card is also printed across here and plenty of ventilation holes for air circulation are cut into the metal backplate.

Taking a look at the card from a slightly different angle really does show how gargantuan it really is.

We can see that the card requires three slots in your chassis and that the plastic cooler moulds around the heatsink on the top of the card too.

On the underside of the card, we can see the large heatsink and heatpipe design cooler and how the shrouding moulds around it here.

As this card is said to pack a serious punch, we find two 8-pin PCI-Express power connectors on the top-end of the card.

In terms of power, we have a few unique features around the card including VGA Hotwire technology which allows the user to control the cards voltages from your ROG board while in the BIOS. First up is the Hotwire points for controlling the PLL voltage.

Here we find a Hotwire connector for the Vcore voltage and above we find various solder points for extreme enthusiasts who may want to tinker even further. Also we find some voltage monitoring points present.

Hidden away are some other features including a Safe mode button, – button and + button as well as a 100% turbo fan speed button. The + and – buttons allow the user to increase the voltage up and down on the fly ranging from 1.270V to 1.335V. Of course this can be bypassed by other means when using extreme cooling such as LN2, but for the average user this is enough scalability. The safe mode button can be seen as a clear CMOS style button which resets the BIOS on the card incase you push things to far Lastly we have the 100% fan speed turbo button which as the name suggests, simply ramps up the fan speed to 100% for extreme cooling without going down the LN2 route.

Along the top of the card is where we find two CrossFire connectors for those wanting to pair this card with another 7970 for some multi-GPU action.

Just next to the CrossFire connectors we find a dual-BIOS switch which we’ve seen on other 7970 based cards and Asus have decided to keep it on this card

Lastly finishing things up with the rear I/O, you can see the perspective of how big this mammoth of a card is with its triple slot design. Connectivity wise we find two Dual-link DVI ports and four full-size DisplayPort 1.2 ports. Of course, AMD Eyefinity6 is supported on this card for those wanting to utilise multi-display technology which AMD pride themselves on.

Taking a look at the specs of the card straight out of the box, we can see that Asus have increased the speeds from a stock 7970 from 1050MHz to 1100MHz and the memory speed has increased from 1500MHz to 1650MHz (6.6GHz Effective) on this card.the core clock and 1350MHz on the memory clock (5.4GHz Effective). Other specifications include 3GB of GDDR5 memory running on a 384-bit memory interface.

The test the performance of this card, we use the latest drivers direct from the manufacturer and run each test three times to obtain a fair average set of results.
3DMark 11 is the latest offering from Futuremark, taking full advantage of DirectX 11 by utilising tessellation features and volumetric lighting. It takes your graphics and CPU hardware to the edge to simulate the most extreme conditions whilst working as a stand point to compare results with other users online

Getting the ball rolling with 3DMark 11, we can see some strong results from the Matrix Platinum, which falls just behind the Sapphire Vapor-X 6GB on the Performance preset but comes up ahead on the Extreme preset. The overclock from the card shows against a reference 7970, the performance is boosted all-round yet still can’t quite compete with the GTX 680 from Nvidia.
Heaven 2.5 is regarded to be one of the most intensive Benchmarking utilities about at the moment along with the likes of 3DMark. It makes use of highly comprehensive tessellation technology, advanced SSAO (screen-space ambient occlusion) and a highly defined light algorithm to produce ever changing light conditions amongst other items.

Within Heaven, the Matrix Platinum really did rival the GTX 680 across multiple resolutions, actually competing heavily with 680 SOC from Gigabyte.
Compared to a stock 7970 some nice performance gains by around 20 FPS were seen on the Matrix Platinum.

Aliens Vs Predator is a science fiction first-person shooter computer game that relies on DirectX 11 and high amounts of Tessellation in conjunction to give enhanced shadows and fantastic textures to the surrounds and characters within the game.

In our gaming tests, we find that the Matrix Platinum outperofms all of the single core GPU cards by quite a margin and steams ahead of the reference speed 7970.
Dirt Showdown is a videogame from Codemasters and is part of the Colin McRae Rally games revolving around a tour of events to compete in allowing you to win money and prizes to spend on new cars and upgrades as well as unlocking new events and races. The game uses high resolution textures and AA settings to simulate dust particles, terrain and damage to the vehicles.

We see the same story with Dirt Showdown, where none of the other cards tested could compete and the performance gains over a reference card were around 10 FPS.
F1 2012 is the latest in the F1 franchise from Codemasters based around the 2012 Formula One season with 24 drivers, 12 teams and 20 circuits including Grand Prix. The game uses intensive DirectX 11 graphics with high levels of Anti-Aliasing to give the most realistic quality gameplay so far from the franchise of F1 games.

Some more performance gains were seen over the reference card in F1 2012 and for a game that is optimized for Nvidia, the 7970 showed some solid performance across all resolutions.
Metro 2033 is a first-person shooter game based in the Russian metro system. Metro 2033 is very similar to the much loved game STALKER as it is developed by the same programmers. The game utilises DirectX 11 and relies heavily on tessellation features and is considered to be one of the most graphics intense games on the market

On all resolutions, the only card that managed to push ahead was the dual core 6990 from AMD showing that this is the best performing card we’ve had for Metro 2033 gameplay. The increase over the reference card was around 5-8 FPS.
Sleeping Dogs is a 2012 open world action-adventure game based around Wei Shen; a Chinese-American police officer going undercover. The game utilises DirectX 11 features as well as high quality intensive reflections and high-resolutions textures

Our last gaming test was Sleeping Dogs and the Matrix Platinum effortlessly sailed through it on all three resolutions. The increase over a stock 7970 was phenomenal and some close to 100 FPS figures were seen in this game.
Noise is generally the bain of most consumers lives and in the hope of finding the quietest operation, we feel it’s necessary to show you the audio level of components. We use the same components throughout this test and use a sound level meter to record the audio level of the system with a passive graphics card installed. Once we have the level recorded with the passive card, we continue to change the graphics card for the one that we are testing. Due to us having the audio level recorded before installation, it gives us a guide to work with and shows that anything over our initial level is an audio gain.

This card features some extreme cooling with the DirectCUII solution and with that we see little increase from idle to load and see this card falling below that of competitor cards of a similar high-end nature
To test power consumption, we monitor the overall power of the system through a plug-in electricity usage monitor at an idle and load state. This allows us to show the fluctuation between how much power draw the graphics card takes at idle and at load. By monitoring the overall usage of the whole system, it gives an easy comparison if you wish to do the same yourself as opposed to buying very expensive individual testing equipment.

Power wise, the card uses a very low 144 Watts at idle which is below that of the 680 SOC and not to much of an increase over the stock AMD reference card. At load, the system ended up pulling 322 Watts which is still below that of the 680 SOC but is quite a big jump from the stock AMD 7970 card.
Measuring temperatures is all about being consitent, therefore we keep a steady eye on monitoring the ambient room temperature to make sure that it stays the same. While this is constantly being monitored, we measure the idle temperature of the card using HWMonitor over a 15 minute period. Once this has been recorded, we set FurMark into motion for 15 minutes and record the results again.

Temperature wise, this card simply astounded us with an amazingly low 33 degrees idle and still a remarkable 66 watts load. Sure when we compare against the GTX 680 cards, it’s not the greatest performer in this area, but we all know that AMD cards chuck out more heat so this is amazing in its own right.
Though this card has some extreme overclocking options, most are reserved for the extreme overclocker and enthusiasts and therefore we will be focussing on what results we’re able to get by just pushing the power envelope and increasing the speeds of the GPU clock and memory clock.
Reminding ourselves that a reference AMD Radeon 7970 comes with a GPU clock speed of 1050MHz and a memory clock speed of 1500MHz (6GHz Effective) and this card straight out of the box comes with a GPU clock speed of 1100MHz and a memory clock speed of 1650MHz (6.6GHz Effective), we were still keen to see if we could push it further.
We went with our usual bunch of software that we trust including MSI Afterburner, Furmark, GPU-Z and 3DMark 11 which gives us options to increase our cards performance and to stress test it too.
We were absolutely amazed by the results we achieved, of which you can find the validation here. We ended up 100% stable at 1281MHz GPU clock and a memory clock speed of 1800MHz (7.2GHz Effective) which is absolutely out of this world and it does seem we had a fantastic sample here as looking around, other sites weren’t quite able to get this high.

We’re big fans of ROG based products and this card is no different and I’m sure if you’ve read the review, you’ll know why as it simply ticks every box and is designed for those wanting the very most out of a graphics card and even gives you further options if the stock performance isn’t enough for you, but we’re sure that for the most part, you won’t be disappointed.
We’ve taken a look at specialist cards like this before including the Lightning series from MSI and Vapor-X from Sapphire and Asus pride themselves on their ROG range and that is what makes this card so special. The added features won’t be used by half the people buying this card and the majority of them will be buying it because they can and not because they need it. A lot of the features are complete overkill but that’s what this is all about as it opens up a broad spectrum or customers including the enthusiasts and extreme overclockers who will be running this baby on LN2 trying to break world records. We’ve seen it done with ROG products before and we know we’ll see it with this one too.
In terms of the boost seen in performance over a reference 7970, we saw some really strong performance increases and overclockability was simple gobsmacking and we’re still amazed as to how far this card wanted to be pushed. Even when overclocked to extreme levels without the use of third-party cooling, we didn’t see the temperatures go over 70 degrees which for an AMD 7970 Tahiti core is pretty damn impressive and that’s all down to the DirectCU II cooler which frankly is HUGE. It takes up three slots in your chassis and includes two large fans to keep things in check.
The card also includes some pretty cool features including the lighting show on top, which shines through the cut-out wording to show you when the card is under extreme pressure and serious load and this is a lovely touch inside a chassis and will pretty much match up with any colour scheme though the red and black colouring of the cooler obviously goes well with one type of motherboard; an Asus ROG board of course. That’s why you will also find bundled accessories like the Hotwire cables which allows you to connect the card to your board and control its voltages through your ROG motherboards BIOS which simply in my opinion is epic.
It’s little things like this that really make this card shine and that all adds to the value factor and coming in around the £400 mark, it’s not exactly cheap, but you just have to remember about all of the benefits you get from a product like this. It’s the Ferrari of the car world and that makes you one very rich individual and the envy of many many people.
Asus have done a simply amazing job with this card and it’s down to every last detail, much like a Ferrari with the addition of the DirectCUII cooler, the plentiful overclock, the added features for voltage control and even the bundled MOSFET heatsink for those wanting to push it under LN2. We’ve looked at cards like this before on the GTX 680 level, but never had a chance to really see a 7970 that can take on the world until now.
The Asus Matrix HD 7970 Platinum really is the fastest single core graphics card on the planet and it certainly packs a punch while still being quiet, efficient and cool and though its the size of a small house, it still looks beautiful no matter how you look at it and no matter who you are, you know you want one.