ASUS Matrix HD 7970 Platinum Video Card Review

Final Thoughts & Conclusions

The ASUS HD 7970 Matrix Platinum 3GB video card will go down in the history books as the best AMD Radeon HD 7970 graphics card ever made. This card has so many features on it that you could literally spend all day talking about each and every nuance on it. ASUS designed this card to be the fastest single-GPU video card on the market and it looks like they easily achieved that goal and then some. You can thank the custom PCB, DIGI+ VRM with 20-phase power and the DirectCU II GPI cooler for making this card so special.

When it comes to overall performance, this card is hard to beat and was at the top of the charts in the majority of the benchmark tests today. It consumes a bit more power than the Radeon HD 7970 and GeForce GTX 680 cards that we compared it against, but made up for that with how silent this card is at idle and during gaming. The only real downside to this card is that it takes up three slots and is over 11-inches long, but very few people use up all the slots on motherboards these days. If you are looking to run CrossFire this card would be amazing in a setup like that, but make sure your motherboard has the PCIe x16 slots spaced properly apart in order to accommodate this card.

Overclocking performance was spectacular and we were able to overclock this Radeon HD 7970 higher than any of the dozen that we have tested to date. We were able to reach 1315MHz on the core clock with full stability! That is 390MHz or 42% higher than the original core clock set by AMD on the reference card. Running a Radeon HD 7970 at 925MHz is great, but being able to run one at 1315MHz makes for a whole new gaming experience! The ASUS GPU Tweak utility was all we needed to reach this overclock and with the features of this card, overclock was uber simple.

The ASUS HD 7970 Matrix Platinum 3GB (MATRIX-HD7970-P-3GD5) retails online for for $499.99 shipped. You can run out and get the lowest cost AMD Radeon HD 7970 for $387 shipped after rebates, so it costs $113 more than the reference design. Is it worth the extra cash? Absolutely! The ASUS HD 7970 Matrix Platinum is an entirely different beast and for those that want the best and like to brag about what they own, this is as good as it gets. We love that ASUS keeps raising the bar when it comes to what one can expect from their flagship video cards. Innovation is something that is needed to keep products better for consumers and we are glad to see ASUS leading the way.

Legit Bottom Line: The ASUS HD 7970 Matrix Platinum 3GB video card was able to deliver and is likely going to be regarded as the nicest AMD Radeon HD 7970 video card produced by any company.