The Card

Coming in as part of the Matrix series means that the card is going to have its own cooling design. Like most GTX 285s we have a cooler that really manages to cover the card from top to bottom and left to right.

The bottom left does show us the ROG logo while the fan on the right side has the ASUS one, but apart from that there isn't a whole lot else to be looking at.

The rear of the card has two PCI-E connectors, one an 6-pin and the other an 8-pin, closer to the front of the card we have two SLI connectors that give us the ability to run up to three of these cards together.

Something a bit fancy that we do have across the top is the ASUS Matrix logo, when the card is in your system depending on the amount of load the Matrix logo changes color with the help of some LEDs behind it. We start at green when the card is in safe mode and go all the way up to red when the card is under extreme load.

In the I/O department we have the standard connectors that we've become accustom to seeing - two Dual-Link DVI connectors along with a single TV-Out port. What we also have here though is a little connector that does look like a SPIDF audio jack, instead though it's a button with the words "Safe Mode" written on it.

Something that you can do with this card is set clock rates to the BIOS, much like you could with a motherboard. While for the most part this sounds scary, the good news is that if you do mess it up by going too high, with a single click of the button you can go back to the default clock speeds. I have to admit I'm a bit skeptical on this feature, I'll leave my thoughts on it for the final thoughts, though.

Specifications

Looking at the card you have to say to yourself, of course the model comes overclocked out of the box. With the look of the card, fancy new packaging and flash lights on the cooler, we expected some big numbers out of the model, unfortunately we did find ourselves slightly disappointed.

The core has been bumped up from the stock 648MHz to 662MHz, unfortunately that's all, the shader clock remains at the default 1476MHz while the 1GB of GDDR3 memory comes in at 2484MHz DDR. With the way the card looks and how ASUS has gone about it we expected some more MHz with clocks that would resemble something in the TOP series of cards.