Tweaking the Tech: Asus Matrix Platinum GTX 780 Ti Review

Asus makes its Matrix series to cater to extreme overclockers and the latest members of this lineup are the R9 290X from AMD and the GTX 780 Ti from NVIDIA. These cards are factory overclocked and made of components that can withstand extreme overclocking using liquid Nitrogen cooling for the sole purpose of shattering world records. Of course, being good overclockers, these cards are also a good investment for the rich enthusiast gamers. We will be reviewing the Matrix 780 Ti this time.

[section label=”Specification” anchor=”Specification”]Specification

The card comes factory overclocked to 1006 MHz base clock (876 MHz stock) with boost clock at 1072 MHz (928 MHz stock) which are roughly 15% gains. The memory is not overclocked however, but being Hynix GDDR5 chips, they should be able to support quite some overclocking. The GK 110 architecture of the card is quite renowned for its raw performance and power efficiency.

The dimensions of the two slot card are roughly 28.7cm x 15.2cm x4 cm and it features a modified DirectCU II cooler with two 92mm fans, each with a distinctive look. This is an excellent cooler design, though the angular shape of the casing and the card’s excessive width can cause problems when screwing it in. The angular shape also makes the card longer by about 2cm. The card has two PCI-E connector lights which are rather helpful at showing if the connectors have been inserted correctly. It also comes with a Load Indicator strip with an Asus ROG logo that glows blue, orange or red as per the load being low, medium or high respectively.

The rear panel has one DVI-D connector, one DVI-I connector, one HDMI connector and one DisplayPort connector. The top of the card is also covered by a heat sheath. The card has two SLI connectors.

The launch price for the Matrix Platinum GTX 780 Ti is ₹60,000.

[section label=”Build Quality” anchor=”bq”]Build Quality and Packaging

The card comes neatly packaged in a box with a flip cover, one that touts its unique features while showing it through a window, and a handle for ease of carrying around its bulk. The card itself it embedded in Styrofoam along with a couple of 2x6pin to 1x8pin PCI-E power adapters and a metal RoG Badge. Below the card is a paper enclosure for the Driver CD and Manual. All the exposed connectors on the card come with their own little plastic protection covers.

The Build quality of the card is excellent as one might expect from an Asus ROG branded product. The Brushed metal finish of the heat sheath goes splendidly well with the smooth black PCB. The distinctive Matrix variant of the DirectCU II cooler design is very efficient at keeping the card cool and silent. The card has many little features that will appeal to overclockers such as contact points for reading, a 4 pin Molex connector for defrosting the memory, a BIOS reset button and a BIOS switch for running with liquid Nitrogen cooling. These options however will never be of use to the average user.

[section label=”Testing Methodology” anchor=”TM”]Testing Methodology

We tested the Matrix Platinum GTX 780 Ti not only for the average Frames per Second(FPS) but also for the 99^th Percentile Frame time which tells us about the performance of the GPU within the second. Within the Second testing is useful to understand micro-stutter which can render a game unplayable despite FPS being high. Fraps 3.5.99 allowed us to calculate both.
Since the card is a Top End GPU, we decided to use highest possible settings in our benchmark games and compare with other Top End GPUs. We tried to disable CPU dependent settings or minimise their impact where possible. VSync and frame buffering were disabled for testing. All tests were run at 1920×1080 on a single monitor configuration.

Test System:
CPU: AMD Phenom II X4 965 BE C3 @ 3.8GHz
Motherboard: ASRock 970 Extreme 3
RAM: 2x4GB G.Skill Sniper CL9 1600MHz, 2x2GB G.Skill Ripjaws CL9 1600MHz
PSU: Corsair TX650 650W (for Matrix Platinum GTX 780 Ti, Mars GTX 760), Seasonic S12II Bronze 620W (for others)
HDD: 2xSeagate Barracuda 7200.12 1TB, 1xWesten Digital Red 3TB
OS: Windows 8.1 x64
NVIDIA Driver: 334.89 for benchmarks
NVIDIA Driver: 340.43 (Beta Driver) for overclocking
AMD Driver: 14.3 Beta 1 (Beta Driver)

While this system may not look like a purpose built test rig, we decided to use a normal usage PC so as to better reflect real world scores of the card. The games were also tested with a few applications like Antivirus, Browser, VOIP tool and others running in the background to get a realistic usage scenario. All HDDs were thoroughly defragmented prior to usage. Due to lack of equipment we were unable to conduct acoustic and power testing.

[section label=”3DMark” anchor=”3DM”]3DMark Firestrike

3Dmark is an artificial Benchmarking tool whose Firestrike Test is very thorough on DirectX 11cards powering High-end PCs. The full test run for Firestrike includes 2 GPU only tests, a CPU dependent Physics Test and a Combined Graphics and Physics Test. The Tool is also useful for stress testing a GPU when run on loop.

Given that we are looking for the Performance of the Card itself, one should look at the Graphics score and the FPS for Graphics tests 1 and 2. The Physics and Combined tests are CPU dependent which is the limiting factor of our test rig.

[section label=”Game Benchmarks” anchor=”GB”]Game Benchmarks

Batman Arkham Origins

Batman Arkham Origins is a game that’s been supported by NVIDIA and utilises their PhysX technology to handle physics. We used highest possible settings. PhysX was also set to Enhanced. We ran the inbuilt benchmark tool with a FRAPS timed run of 120 seconds. Since this benchmark was picked mainly to showcase the NVIDIA exclusive PhysX performance, one should ignore the AMD card results which are generated sans PhysX.

The card beats other NVIDIA cards quite substantially in the FPS and 99^th percentile frame time. Curiously, it dips lower in the minimum frame rate than the GTX 770, but as we shall see later, this is not the card’s fault. With PhysX turned off, the card can improve easily double the FPS, which accounts for the AMD card’s higher values, though we benchmarked this game to specifically compare the PhysX performance.

The 99^th Percentile graph shows tight frametimes with the noticeable spikes being caused by transitions in the benchmark’s scenes. The sharp FPS dips correspond to these transitions which makes it seem to be a HDD dependent factor. No microstuttering was observed in our crisp looking run.

Battlefield 4

Battlefield 4 uses the Frostbite 3 engine to push the visual processing boundaries of current hardware. Since Mantle is only for AMD cards, we ran the DX11 version with the highest possible settings. The game offers no benchmark tool, so we used areas from the first single player campaign mission for the FRAPS run.

The card dominates the competition in this game with only the dual gpu Mars 760 coming close in the FPS. The 99^th percentile frametime is also quite low.

The densely packed frametime graph has no large spike indicating butter smooth frame rendering and fluid gameplay. The FPS does show spikes and valleys which are all above 50FPS but vsync should smoothen that.

Bioshock infinite

The Unreal Engine 3 powered Bioshock Infinite really pushed the boundaries of visual effects achievable with the ageing engine. It comes with a built in benchmark mode which runs for a lower time period than the standard 120s we used in other tests.

Another game with the dual GPU Mars 760 coming within 1 FPS of the Matrix 780 Ti. The minimum FPS is rather close indicating a load time influence that is out of the GPU’s control. The 99^th percentile frame rate is also the lowest.

The frametime graph flows somewhat tightly spaced, though there are quite a few spikes in some areas. While the FPS curve in these areas looks ok, there was noticeable screen tearing in the benchmark run.

Company of Heroes 2

Relic’s Company of Heroes 2 is a tough nut to crack for quite a few GPUs, though it’s dependent on CPUs to a great degree as well. We used highest possible Settings with Physics turned off and Low AA for the short 45s benchmark run the game offers.

The game is CPU dependent and doesn’t seem to support SLI so the MARS was effectively running as a single GTX 760 with 2GB VRAM. The Matrix Platinum 780 Ti however seems to be quite capable of maintaining a barely playable framerate in this game with the best performance across all three criteria.

While the frametimes are close for most of the graph, there are some spikes while the game showed some heavy destruction. Since the FPS was in barely playable territory, microstuttering was the least of our worries. Lowering the settings and better optimisation should improve the FPS.

Crysis 3

CryEngine 3 was built to push the PC Hardware to its limits with Crysis 3 and deliver Maximum Eye Candy. We used the highest possible settings for the purpose of our test. The test run consisted of a section of the first mission for 120s as the game surprisingly offers no benchmark tool.

The Matrix Platinum 780 Ti breezes through Crysis 3 with a minimum of 30 FPS. The 99^th percentile frametime is also lower by quite some margin.

The game shows a lot of spikes not only on the frametime graph, but also on the FPS graph. Some microstuttering was noticeable in certain areas but the game run was smooth for the most part.

Far Cry 3

Far Cry 3 is a visually impressive game that lacks a benchmark mode. We used highest possible settings and the test run consisted of a 120s sample from the game’s single player campaign where we spent some time goofing off in the open world.

Bucking the trend of NVIDIA cards performing somewhat poorly in this AMD optimised game, the Matrix Platinum 780 Ti powers through this game with the best scores in all categories beating even the AMD card.

While the graph might appear rather rough note that the values are tightly concentrated in the 10-50ms range with a couple of spikes. In comparison, the FPS graph has much wilder swings. Gameplay was fluid and microstuttering wasn’t visible.

GRID 2

GRID 2 from Codemasters is one of the few games in our test suite that has no allegiance to either NVIDIA or AMD, which makes it a neutral candidate to better judge the GPU’s performance. We used highest possible Settings to run the benchmark tool offered by the game.

While the game is GPU vendor neutral, making it a better performance comparison guide, the Matrix Platinum GTX 780 Ti stamps its superiority by a significant margin in all the criteria.

No microstuttering marred our benchmark run as can be seen from the densely packed frametime graph although the variation in FPS was sometimes noticeable.

Sleeping Dogs

While the game is ageing, Sleeping Dogs is still a stunner when it comes to running benchmarks. We pushed the settings to highest possible and ran the game’s built in benchmark run.

This AMD optimised game was no big challenge for our card as once again it beat the AMD card by a huge margin. The raw power of this GPU is quite admirable.

The game shows major spikes in the areas where it transitions between scenes in the benchmark but has a fairly constant run in those scenes. Microstuttering wasn’t noticeable in the run which seems to get a FPS dip in the indoor areas.

Tomb Raider

Tomb Raider introduced us to a new Lara with fabled TressFX hair that behaves a lot more realistically than the pre-rendered mop we were used to. However the card does not seem to cope well with this technology and we had to drop it in our test run. We used highest possible settings with TressFX on. The Test run was shorter since the benchmark tool offered by the game runs for less than out 120s target time.

TressFX taxes the NVIDIA card, but it still manages to emerge superior by quite a significant margin as compared to its competitors.

The game seems to have consistent spiking in the frametime graph indicating some microstuttering as we have seen with other cards for this game. It could be quirk of the benchmark itself however.

Total War: Rome II

Total War: Rome II is another CPU heavy game that offers significant visual goodness. It offers a benchmark tool that focuses more on GPU power though and that is what we used for our test run of 120s. We set the game to Extreme and Unit Size to Small so as to reduce the impact of the CPU. Unlimited Video Memory was off so the game could scale down visual settings if it reached a bottleneck.

Bucking the trend with NVIDIA cards for this game, the Matrix Platinum GTX 780 Ti seems to have a relatively easy time with this game even with Vegetation Alpha turned on. It is possible the game has been optimised more with patches since our earlier tests.

The spikes in the frametime seem to follow a dense pattern rather than being isolated, which implies no microstuttering, but rather a heavy dip in the FPS. It is confirmed to be the case on inspecting the FPS graph.

[section label=”Acoustics” anchor=”acoustics”]Acoustics

Our acoustics testing consisted of trying to determine how noticeable the noise output from the card was, when kept in a case at 1m distance with the side panel closed, as it might be in a real world scenario. Noise is a very relative characteristic that depends not only one the person hearing, but also the background noise of their surroundings. During the course of our testing, we found that the card barely went over 50% fan speed even at full load, which made barely noticeable noise. Even the idle speed is rather quiet and at times quieter than the other PC components. However, setting the fans at 100% rpm makes a noticeable din though not something highly distracting. Given that this setting was never reached in actual usage scenarios, Asus’s cooler design is quite laudable.

[section label=”Temperatures” anchor=”Temps”]Temperatures

At idle the card hovered in the 38°-40°C range with an ambient temperature of 30°C. What was interesting though was that even after stress testing for a significant amount of time, the card’s maximum reported temperature was 78°C. And this jumped to 82°C with our overclock. Asus has done a really good job with its cooler design for the card.

[section label=”Power” anchor=”Pwr”]Power

The card comes in a dual 8 pin power connector configuration which rates it at 250W though it might exceed that when overclocked. The card requires a significantly beefy PSU for overclocking. For a card like this one rarely bothers with power efficiency, however the performance per watt offered by the GK110 chips is quite good.

[section label=”Overclocking” anchor=”oc”]Overclocking

The card comes factory overclocked and is bundled with Asus’s own GPU Tweak utility to further overclock it. Curiously this just refused to save nay settings for our review sample and we had to use MSI Afterburner to overclock. We were able to push the core clock to 1084MHz with boost clock at 1150 MHz and the Hynix VRAM chips to 1950 MHz (7800 MHz effective) which is a total overclock of about 23% over stock (7% over factory overclock) for the core clock and about 11% for the VRAM. These are impressive figures for overclocking without any alterations to the card. This is a borderline stable overclock however and you might want to lower values to be on the safe side. All our tests however, were conducted in the stock configuration.

We ran 3DMark to check improvements in the overclocked performance and the graphics score increased from 12243 to 13280.

We also ran the benchmark offered by the game Thief to get a real world idea of the performance gains. We used the Very High settings for our runs which concluded in less time than our standard 120 second runs. One must note that Thief is slightly unreliable as a benchmark due to inconsistency in results across various runs. That said, we got an improvement of about 1-2 fps on average with a lower 99^th percentile frametime.

[section label=”Feature Set” anchor=”FS”]Feature Set

Asus bundles its GPU tweak utility for easy overclocking of the card. With NVIDIA’s GeForce Experience, the card can support features like Shadowplay and game streaming but the card’s LEDs cannot be controlled.

[section label=”Conclusion” anchor=”End”]Conclusion

The Matrix Platinum GTX 780 Ti is a brilliant card. The card’s striking design and extreme overclocking abilities make it a really good investment if you have the money. However, some of its overclocker specific features are never going to be used by the regular user which does bring its worth to a prospective buyer into question. On the other hand, one must note that by itself the card is quite the stellar performer and its extra overclocking potential is just icing on the cake. Then there is, of course, the brag value of having such a quality product powering your battlestation.
The pricing of the card as compared to a stock GTX 780 Ti is a little bit higher, but we feel the build quality and the overclocking potential merits it. When you consider value for money in the Top End segment, you look at the performance that you’re getting for the premium pricing and this card has good value in that sense. The card’s excellent DirectCU II cooler keeps it quiet and thermally stable even under extreme loads and overclocking.
The card has some issues with the practicality of its stunning angular design and larger size, but these are limited only to its installation and removal. Asus’s own GPU tweak utility does seem inadequate in unlocking the full overclocking potential of the card and it’s advisable to use MSI Afterburner for this purpose. Considering all the findings of our tests, we award this card the iLL Gaming Gold and Editor’s Pick awards.

We are extremely grateful to Asus for providing us with a test sample for reviewing.