ASUS ROG GTX 980 Matrix Platinum – Pushing Maxwell to the Limit

Overclocking

The new Maxwell architecture requires not as much power as previous cards which I think is great and this sometimes means more OC headroom as well. The boost clock does make it a bit more difficult to figure out final clock as the card dynamically boosts depending upon thermals and power.

First up, we have the reference GTX 980

Next up we have the Matrix Platinum at its out of the box clocks

Here we have the card at max achievable clocks on air.

The Matrix Platinum runs great out of the box knocking out the reference 980, and when you overclock it, things only get better. The max GPU clock achieved was 1378 with a max observed boost of 1529.

The memory on the matrix ran up to 7700MHz and simply wouldn’t go further, this is a bit of a surprise with these ICs as I have used many cards that can get around 8GHz but this is the luck of the draw and the card I got is about average in terms of air overclocking.

Now with that said do keep in mind that things can change quite drastically when cold, and this card is well equipped to push under cold so as these cards get out into the wild we will see how they perform in the hands of extreme overclockers.

All in all the GPU could clock to 1378 which is 252MHz over a reference card which is over 19%, and 137MHz over the out of the box clock which is slightly over 10% overclock on air.

TEMPERATURES

To measure the temperature of the video card, we used MSI Afterburner and ran Heaven Benchmark in a loop to find the Load temperatures for the video cards. The highest temperature was recorded. After looping for 10 minutes, Heaven was turned off and we let the computer sit at the desktop for another 10 minutes before we measured the idle temperatures.

The Matrix Platinum even at max clock barely hit 70C under long term stress testing which is a great result for such a powerful card. Meanwhile even under full stress that 70C temp was maintained with auto fan speeds and you cannot even hear it.

POWER CONSUMPTION

To get our power consumption numbers, we plugged in our Kill A Watt power measurement device and took the Idle reading at the desktop during our temperature readings. We left it at the desktop for about 15 minutes and took the idle reading. Then we ran Heaven Benchmark for a few minutes and recorded the highest power usage.

Here the ASUS ROG GTX 980 Matrix Platinum sits right with the rest of the 980s at idle and about 24W over a reference 980 under full loading. This kind of horsepower is attained easily beating previous gen top cards which are also quite power hungry means a lower power bill for your gaming rig.