Specifications and Testing Configuration

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ASUS ROG Matrix GTX 580 Specifications

Despite the highly over-engineered nature of the Matrix GTX 580, most of you will likely be surprised at the relatively tame clock speeds that the card runs at by default.  With a core clock rate of 816 MHz, just a 44 MHz boost over the reference speeds, we expect the performance out of the box to be just slightly higher than all of the other cards on the market.  Memory speeds are running at 1002 MHz, the same as the reference GTX 580s. 

I know a lot of our readers are going to question this – why release a card that is so obviously capable of running at higher speeds with such a minimal overclock?  To many people it will look like ASUS isn’t confident in their products enough to back up the overclocking potential that they claim the card is engineered to have.  While that is definitely not the case, I can see that point of view clearly.  ASUS still says that "the majority" of cards will be capable of speeds as high as 950-975 MHz but by keeping the default speeds low, and binning based on power and noise considerations, they can keep stock on this card better than the competition has done with some of their super-high-end models.  We will just have to see.

As you should expect, the ROG Matrix GTX 580 from ASUS comes it at among the highest priced single GPU cards on the market at $529.  Looking at the base price on reference quality GTX 580s though that is only an increase of $60 or about 12%.  I hesitate to say this…but the Matrix GTX 580 might not be a bad deal after all?

Our benchmarking and testing setup remains pretty much unchanged:

  • Testing Configuration
  • ASUS P6X58D Premium Motherboard
  • Intel Core i7-965 @ 3.33 GHz Processor
  • 3 x 2GB Corsair DDR3-1333 MHz Memory
  • Western Digital VelociRaptor 600GB HDD
  • Corsair Professional Series 1200w PSU
  • Benchmarks used: 3DMark Vantage, 3DMark11, Metro 2033, Lost Planet 2, Civilization V, F1 2010, Left 4 Dead 2, 3DMark11
  • NVIDIA Driver: 275.33
  • AMD Driver: 11.7

Let’s dive into our performance testing and see how the ASUS ROG Matrix GTX 580 stands up to the competition!

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