Introduction

As a leading motherboard and graphics card vendor, ASUS has plenty of resources to put into design and development of high-end products that are deviant from reference design, and qualifies as being genuinely in-house. The Republic of Gamers (ROG) line has housed the company's very best in motherboards and graphics cards, targeting consumer segment. Compared to ROG-branded motherboards, while ROG-branded graphics cards are few and far between, ROG does manage to make some extremely desirable limited edition graphics cards.



Seen first at Computex 2011, the ASUS Matrix GTX 580 is a NVIDIA GeForce GTX 580, that is geared toward overclockers and enthusiasts. The card sports many features for the hardcore overclocking crowd like voltage measurement pads on the card and extensive software voltage control. It is also the first card that comes with solder bridges to enable additional tweaking potential. In terms of cooling, ASUS is using a new variant of their triple slot Direct CU heatsink, which promises maximum cooling performance while still keeping noise levels at a minimum. The card is also backed by a wealth of ASUS ROG-exclusive features such as fan throttle, ROG GPU Tweak, redundant BIOS with Safe Mode fallback, and a huge aesthetic boost for your rig.

Packaging

We received the card without packaging. ASUS has promised to send the missing packaging and accessories as soon as possible. Once we receive them we will update this page.

The Card

The ASUS GTX 580 Matrix is a huge card with a dual fan heatsink, the back is covered by a metal plate which protects the components and acts as heatspreader.


The card requires three slots in your system.


Display connectivity is two DVI ports, one full size HDMI port and one full size DisplayPort output. Due to NVIDIA's display output logic design you are limited to two active displays at any time. AMD GPUs have a more flexible configuration and allow up to six active outputs at the same time.

An HDMI sound device is included in the GPU, too. It is HDMI 1.4a compatible which includes HD audio and support for Blu-ray 3D movies. The DisplayPort interface is DisplayPort 1.2 compliant which allows the use of a DisplayPort hub to connect multiple monitors, or daisy chain them together.


You may combine up to four GTX 580 cards from any vendor in a multi-GPU SLI configuration.


Pictured above are photos of the front and back, showing the disassembled board. High-res versions are also available (front, back). If you choose to use these images for voltmods etc, please include a link back to this site or let us post your article.

A Closer Look

ASUS continues use of their Direct CU cooler design which uses five heatpipes that make direct contact with the GPU surface.


To cool the voltage regulation circuitry this massive metal heatsink is used. It sits in the airflow of the right side fan to keep it cool.


On the back of the card a metal plate has been installed which adds to the visual impression of the card, protects components on the back from accidential damage and acts as passive heatsink for heat moving through the PCB to the back of the card.


The cards has two 8-pin PCIe power connectors. This configuration is good for up to 375 W power draw.


ASUS has placed several measuring spots near the bottom right edge of the PCB. You can measure six GPU voltages here - very nice.


The big red button you see in the picture above sets fan speed to 100% when pressed. Once you press it again, the card returns to normal auto-controlled fan speeds. The plus and minus buttons next to the red button are used to change the GPU operating voltage. An offset of up to 12.5 mV can be applied to the whole voltage regulation circuitry, on top of any software voltage settings. All three buttons work fully in hardware - no software required.


In case your overclocking adventures are too optimistic, or you mess up a BIOS flash, pressing this button will return the card to default frequencies and the default BIOS, so you can restore operation easily.


The solderpads shown above can be bridged by solder or a 0 Ohm resistor to activate advanced functionality. "Disable OCP" disabled overheat protection and removes overcurrent protection for LN2 overclocking. "FBDDO" is used to increase memory voltage, "PEXVDD" increases PLL voltage and "Power PWM Freq" doubles the voltage regulator clock frequency from 250 kHz to 500 kHz.


The GDDR5 memory chips are made by Samsung, and carry the model number K4G10325FE-HC04. They are specified to run at 1250MHz (5000 MHz GDDR5 effective).


ASUS has rebranded the voltage controller on their card to show "SHE: Super Hybrid Engine". It looks like a model from uPI with software voltage control. A second chip called "iROG" is also placed on the board, it seems to control the three button and the glowing Matrix current load indicator.


NVIDIA's GeForce 110 graphics processor is made on a 40 nm process at TSMC Taiwan. It uses approximately 3.0 billion transistors which is 200 million less than the GF100. Please note that the silvery metal surface you see is the heatspreader of the GPU. According to NVIDIA, the die size of the GF110 graphics processor is 520 mm².