Overclocking

Obviously you’d be mad to buy this card and not overclock it. We’ve been harping on about how it’s more expensive than the XFX Radeon HD 5870 Black Edition and realistically it’s all the expensive overclocking gadgets that are the cause of this. In short - we had better see some bang for our extra buck.

We used the bundled Tracker 2 software, which is custom made for the Asus Matrix HD 5870, to see what we could tease out of the card. It’s worth mentioning here that we enjoyed using the Tracker 2 software, it’s quick and easy to use and has a number of preset profiles for the card which were useful.

It also has four blank profiles so successful overclocks can be saved and applied quickly. Tracker 2 also allows you fine-grained control of the voltages coursing through your card, an obvious benefit when aiming for a jumbo overclock. The software did crash a number of times, usually when we pushed the card too far, but overall this was only a minor annoyance.


After a fun bit of tinkering we settled on a GPU clock of 1.03GHz (up from 894MHz) and a memory speed of 1.25GHz (5GHz effective) rather than the 1.2GHz the memory ran at by default. This required a GPU voltage of 1,450mV, a VDDCI Voltage (whatever that is) of 1,325mV and a memory voltage of 1,730mV. We also relaxed the memory timings down to the ‘overclocking’ presets the software provided, as the ‘performance’ presets were a little tight and limited our overclock.

With these settings the Matrix performed much better, outperforming the XFX at each resolution we tested at. The overclock is also impressive when you realize that the XFX barely overclocked past its factory speeds, meaning that the Matrix's overclocking paraphernalia do have a quantifiable benefit. Some perspective is needed though, as the 10 per cent boost the overclock gave us rarely made the difference between playable and non-playable frame rates.

Conclusion

The Asus Matrix HD 5870 is a good looking card with a number of added extras - it’s certainly in line with the rest of the RoG line. It’s also one of the most expensive HD 5870s around, so we expected it to do something special to justify its price tag.

Unfortunately it doesn’t really deliver. Yes, it's a great overclocker, and being able to adjust the voltages of the card through the Tracker 2 software is a genuinely useful feature, but at the end of the day the HD 5870 GPU just doesn’t gain that much from a 150MHz overclock.

This means that the Matrix offers little over a stock HD 5870, a travesty given that it costs £80 more than standard cards. The card could potentially gain favour in extreme overclocking circles, where the voltage readout points and flexible memory timings are useful, but for everyday use, a standard HD 5870 is £80 cheaper and 95 per cent as good. If someone is forcing you to spend £400 on a graphics card (you poor thing), then the GTX 480 is also worth considering - beware the heat, noise and excessive power consumption, though, as these are significant turn-offs.

• Performance
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• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
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• -
• -
• 8/10

• Features
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• x
• x
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• x
• x
• x
• x
• 10/10

• Value
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• -
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• -
• -
• 6/10

• Overall
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• -
• -
• -
• 7/10

Score Guide