Asus ROG Matrix GTX 285 Review

[Leeghoofd]

Eg When setting a certain manual fan speed, then closing down iTracker2 made the fan speed default again to 20... saving/burning fan speed profiles via the Vbios didn't do a thing here, fan speed was always auto... I didn't try it on Vista, but my sample had these issues on XP and XP64... when using eVGA precision I didn't have this back to default problem so it must be iTracker2 related... There was a newer version already on the Asus website, but the fan issue persisted (maybe it has been corrected in a newer version, as we passed the info we gathered on to the Asus engineers over amonth ago)

For the memory timings we tested each benchmark 3 times, each time after a fresh reboot. As you are a bencher, you will know that you will never get similar results for each run... the gain when using very tight timings ( eg Cas 9 and co) were max 200 points depending on the benchmark... also a few times when I tested the card at stock speeds/ram timings it was quicker than with the performance profile... Taking the average of all the runs the gain was very negligable, great for benchers as I mentioned, to gain that extra few points but for day to day users, it doesn't do much at all... On a note : I never have tweaked ram timings so I approached it the usual way. In games it would hardly reflect any gain... All in the margin of error in fact... if you can find what setting influences performance best plz let us all know ; I only had 1 week time to get all of this testing done...

Been digging in my screenshots : Here's the best run on 03, with far tighter timings than the preset : almost 200 points (card at stock overclocked setting)

STOCK :



TWEAKED




But overal a very impressive card, loved it (better than my vanilla modded eVGA one) , we hated to send it back as we would have loved to use alternative cooling (time limit and the card needed to remain in impeccable state as it is going to be used in the Asus competition) But that's just the way things go :p