Gadgetory

everyone and welcome back to Pauls hardware my name is Paul this is my channel false hardware and theoretically my channel is all about computer parts Hardware reviews overviews unboxings but if you've been watching my channel up till now you might have noticed that there hasn't been a whole lot of that going on but my aim is to remedy that to that end I have my first Hardware review that's going to be on this Asus Matrix HD 7970 platinum video card a few reasons why I chose this one first off I had it available second off AMD just recently released the catalyst 13.1 drivers those are the latest wickel certified drivers as compared to the 12.10 which were out prior to now so I have reminisce card benchmarks with the newer drivers as well as the older drivers beginning guys a little bit of comparison for that also well I've got all this issue stuff I got my shirt see rog shirt I got my Asus laptop in case you're wondering no this video is not sponsored by Asus but I do enjoy their hardware so let's go ahead and jump right into it and we'll start off with a quick look at these specs so here's a comparison of the specs and bear in mind there are a few different versions of the 7970 that are out there you can tell based on the GPU code name so there's the original 7970 that was codenamed Tahiti XT and then they came out with the 7970 gigahertz edition that's the Tahiti XT 2 version so the matrix here is based on the Tahiti XT 2 or the Sony 970 gigahertz Edition and then if you're looking at the frequency therefore the GPU at least the 7970 original ran at 925 megahertz the 7970 gigahertz Edition it runs at 1050 and the matrix sonja at 70 platinum runs at 1104 memory that's one of the other differences here they all have a three gigabyte memory frame buffer however the original 79 so many of the memory was running at 1375 or 5500 affected 7970 gigahertz Edition runs at 1500 megahertz so that's 6000 effectively and then the matrix they cranked it all the way up to 1600 and 50 megahertz and that gives you an effective memory clock of 6600 which is pretty crazy apart from that most of the other specs are the same and the other differences come down to the custom core as well as the custom-designed PCB so now I've written down the specs sicko clueless oh look at what this card is all about now that we have a full video on this card and unboxing an overview where I talk about all of the fancy features that are included I'm going to point out just a few of them here while I give you guys a closer look but this is just a beautiful card as you can see they have a full back plate on the back the entire board here is custom design so whenever AMD comes out with a video card or GPU such as a 7970 they'll have a reference design for the board Asus threw all that away they started from scratch they built their own so that they can position everything where they most wanted it to be positioned they also did this so that they could really really beef up the VRMs the power delivery for the GPU they've done some really cool work such as underneath here so you can see you've got this black bar here with some of their heavier cards they've had issues in the past with drew page that means when the card is actually plugged in let's flip it around to the way it would be position the cards actually plugged in right there this it's so it can be so heavy that it will actually start to droop put some added pressure on the PCI Express slot that you have it plugged into and that's a bad thing so what they've done here is they really added a ton more rigidity to the card and so they have these just really big black beefy component going down the entire thing comes up here and actually makes contact with the PCB this is where you I'm sorry with the PCI bracket this is where you bolt that in so that's gonna be super sturdy right up against that you also have some cool stuff like the matrix logo up here at the top this is going to light up different colors depending on the load that's on the card you've got stuff like specific voltage read points scattered throughout so if you're gonna really be overclocking the card you can get your multimeter in there get your voltage readings to a pins PCI Express power connectors there so plenty of power you have a bios switch right here so this is going to switch between two different bios actually v bios settings to set you up for five or six way eyefinity output via all of the display outs at the back so it's going to change one of these two dual link or single link I forget which one is which right off the bat but I think it actually says yeah single link single link dual link you can switch them though so you can actually push six monitors from the single card these also don't want to come wait wait there we go alright so there's your two DVI connectors so two DVI connectors for full-size DisplayPort connector so it's another huge feature I really like a lot of 7970 s have the little mini DisplayPort connectors this one's got full-size ones no need to buy extra adapters of the card brands cool though and all of my benchmarks and you'll be shown you'll be taking a look at those in just a second I think the hottest it got was in the mid 60's which is really cool for 7970 especially an overclocked one just like this it's by virtue of the three slot cooler it's giving a lot more thermal mass here to help dissipate the heats you've also got some cool features here like a hundred percent fan button I pushed that fans go to hundred percent really helps with benchmarking you can cool the card off very quickly so you can reset to default and jump up to do some more benchmarks you got LED readouts right there for the load on the card got plus and minus indicators right there too for over volting I think those will do 0.125 increments millivolt increments so you can just bump up or or back off the voltage just by the buttons on the card you also have a safe mode button so if you are doing overclocking push that button sets back to default suspects and you can save yourself if you've gotten into a situation that you're having a hard time getting back out of but the benchmark should speak for themselves so let's take a look at those I'm showing you a few comparisons here I'm going to be comparing this to another high-end 1797 that's at 7970 X but H is also comparing this card to itself running both 1210 and the 13.1 drivers then I'm also going to be throwing in a GTX 680 bear in mind that's a reference design GTX 680 running at stock frequencies here's the benchmark so there you have it guys my benchmark comparison comparing the ITO about ten divers with the 13.1 drivers also doing a couple more points of comparison there for you guys as well I guess this is the point in a review where I give my final thoughts so let's see first off I should develop some sort of scoring system so that I can give sort of relative performance indicators for all the hardware that I review but since this is the first one and there's no real point for comparison I'm just gonna leave it pretty generic this is a really really really good card it's also a premium card so bear that in mind this is a platinum version these are harder to find if you don't have the cash for platinum version or if you can't find one there is a non platinum version the only real difference between those is that this one is gonna be running at eleven hundred megahertz out of the box the non platinum runs at ten fifty and really you can take the non platinum version it could overclock it these are definitely gonna overclock the best so if you really want to take a video card see what kind of performance you can get out of it the Platinum Edition have cherry-picked GPUs they're always going to perform better because Asus has tested those prior to releasing the card to verify that yes these are the GPUs we can push really far and the lemon are domakr it's one from this one by the way it's kind of the baseline that's the starting out point you can really push it far past that and Asus has integrated a lot of stuff to allow you to do that it's a triple slot card and I hear a lot of complaints about triple slot cards and I'm not always 100% sure why they're pretty straightforward about it because triple slot cards the vast majority of people who are building computers only use one video card a very very few well not a very very few but ace much smaller number than that will run two cards two-way SLI or crossfire X 3-way or four-way is just such a small part of the number of people who actually build computers that it's really an area where there is other hardware available for that this is not designed for that specific use and if you were going to do something like that anyway you're probably not going to go with air-cooling if you're going with three or four video card chances are you gonna be going towards water cooling setup you're gonna do a custom block on the card it's going to be narrower by virtue of that by itself so the the triple slots spaced cooler in this circumstance give you much more thermal mass allows the car to stay much cooler under load it allows the fans to spin lower I really have to point out that when I'm testing cards especially higher in cards you put them in and they start going and they get really hot and the fans spin up really loud it's such a distraction so that's two things I really like about this card it stays it stays cool and quiet even under full load there is zero and I mean zero coil wine or additional noise from the components on this board and if you've never experienced coil whine wait until you do and it's really bad and it's actually a situation that's popped up with quite a few of some matches of the 7000 series cards depends really a lot on the hardware integrated into the card itself can also depend on the other component you're running such as your power supply your motherboard but this one none of that never made a noise except for the sort of soft whoosh of the fans spin so I hope that's good enough the sort of review conclusion for you guys really liked this card if you got the money go for it because to my knowledge thus far it's the fastest single GPU card that I've tested and I should point out the huge caveat that my comparisons today wear with a standard 680 running at the stock frequency and I really have not tested too many of those high-end custom built 680 s yet but maybe soon but that is gonna wrap it up for this review guys I hope you've enjoyed this has been my first one I'm still looking the kinks out but you bring a more tuna future once again this has been the Asus matrix HD 7970 platinum video card I'm Paul applause hardware if you want to you can subscribe for more videos just like this one I'll see you next week you