Hardware Asus Matrix GTX285 Review

Hm, just got round to installing mine.... not impressed so far. It's making a very, VERY loud whine like something is caught in the fan (which is isn't, the fan is not the cause of the noice).

Performance is also lacking, I'm noticing FPS drops where my GTX's were not even batting an eyelid.

 

Well it was 2x 8800GTXes.

 

I'm talking FPS drops in the Unreal 2.5 engine here - this card should be blitzing it yet the FPS is just crapping out. Latest drivers, brand spanking new OS install.

Going to get some benchmarking done - compare the 2 8800 GTX's to this one card. And at the moment the GTX's are winning because they don't whine like crazy under load.

 

Oh, well then....

Don't look at me..Burn the witch.

 

Is the Crysis benchmark that bit-tech use publicly available? I've now got the game installed, but I've not used this particular game for benchmarking.

 

For the people talking about FPS drops and low performance, have you had rivatuner monitoring in the background? I was playing DoW2 the other day (another great freebie!), and my frames suddenly went drastically down hill. I exited the game, and checked riva, and it said the card had dropped down to 2D clocks before I had even left the game, suggesting the drop was due to the switching over to 2D clocks.

I have also noticed the card varying between 2D and 3D clocks when I am only using the desktop.

As for the whining, you get that with a lot of cards. My 4870X2 does it. However, this card is in a league of it's own. The fan works so well and is rather quiet. The whine is easily much louder than the fan though.

 

the more stress you put the card under, the louder the whine. I had the cheek to run folding@home and I thought I had opened a portal to the Banshee realm inside my PC.

 

To stop the slowdowns, go to nvidia driver control panel, select manage 3d settings and change power mange mode to maximum proformance mode.

 

I assume that keeps the clocks set to 3D mode?

TBH, I only ever had one slowdown that caused me to quite a game. I had one other, but once I hit F10 to bring up the game menu, the clocks must have reverted back. I would rather keep the power saving features enabled.

As far as watercooling goes, I will fire off some emails and do some research, and unless I get told a flat out "Reference blocks won't fit", I will likely get a waterblock and see how it goes near around Christmas. I know it is a while yet, but I really can't afford it right now, as I want/need to get my NB and MOSFETs cooled as well. Hopefully a nice little heatsink will be enough for the SB.

 

A card that is more than twice the price of a GTX275 yet offers little to no perceptible performance increase....... no thanks.

 

Ive ran one of these against the following.

gtx260 216sp
2x gtx260 216sp
gtx275
gtx295
2x gtx295
4870x2

asus gts285 MATRIX.



I can tell you now that if you use 190.68 drivers (which are new) enable performance mode and then stay away from the old 185 drivers, the matrix is about 20% faster than a gtx275. When the gtx275 is overclocked the speed difference is around 10%. Overclock the matrix and you have a further 15% over the gtx275 overclocked. SO in theory, a non overclocked gtx275 is about 30-35% slower than this card when it is overclocked. I would say that extra performance is worth the money.


Andy

 

I might be blind (as is usually the case ), but I couldn't find anything on the noise this card produces...

 

Once I've got mine installed I'll tell you what I think, I'm very much one for a quiet machine so it has a lot to live up to.

 

So you are saying a potential (in some games the difference will be alot less) 30-35% performance increase is worth a 100% price increase? Just.... Wow.....um....ok.....

Of course I could simply go out and buy 2 GTX275's / HD4890's and have a setup massively faster than this card for the same money, now THAT is worth it.

 

Hi.

Please I have this one card and I am trying to overclock it... I tried the spec here on this site:

740mhz core, 1660mhz shader clock, 1180mV GPU voltage, 2820mhz memory clock and 2080mV memory voltage.

Timing from the picture there. It always fails. Can anybody tell me, how can I overclock it by myself, or can anybody send me their specifications, clocks, timings...

Thanks much

 

Your card isn't their card, you can't just take someone's overclocked settings and think they will work for you. Just go up steadily, and bench/stresstest every overclock untill it's unstable, then revert to the last working one.

 

Like said above, you have to increase the clocks slowly until you find instability, then increase the voltage a bit and keep going until you get too hot under load

 

also bit probably does it right.. they take the card apart after a test run and re-do the tims.. I've done this with all of my cards and they always clock better