With Christmas just around the corner, what better time to treat yourself to a new graphics card? Time to put that old card to pasture and invest in a new GTX980 ti. If you fancy something really fast and expensive then the mouth watering Asus Republic Of Gamers GTX980 Ti Platinum Edition might sate your appetite. As we would expect from an Asus flagship solution, the Matrix Platinum is a complete ‘no-compromise’ design.
The Asus ROG Matrix GTX 980Ti Platinum Edition is a heavy beast – shipping with an all metal, proprietary ‘Direct CU II’ cooler and custom backplate. It incorporates a 14 phase DIGI+ VRM with Super Alloy Power II components – to reduce buzzing and eliminate coil whine. If you want to break some overclocking records then you will be pleased to hear that ASUS have a LN2 mode switch on the PCB to unlock voltage and power limits. There is also a ‘Safe Mode’ button to reload and recover the vBIOS and a memory defroster to help prevent cold bug issues.
| GPU | GeForce GTX960 |
Geforce GTX970 | GeForce GTX980 |
Geforce GTX 980 Ti | Geforce GTX Titan X |
| Streaming Multiprocessors | 8 | 13 | 16 | 22 | 24 |
| CUDA Cores | 1024 | 1664 | 2048 | 2816 | 3072 |
| Base Clock | 1126 mhz | 1050 mhz | 1126 mhz | 1000 mhz | 1000 mhz |
| GPU Boost Clock | 1178 mhz | 1178 mhz | 1216 mhz | 1075 mhz | 1076 mhz |
| Total Video memory | 2GB | 4GB | 4GB | 6GB | 12GB |
| Texture Units | 64 | 104 | 128 | 176 | 192 |
| Texture fill-rate | 72.1 Gigatexels/Sec | 109.2 Gigatexels/Sec | 144.1 Gigatexels/Sec | 176 Gigatexels/Sec | 192 Gigatexels/Sec |
| Memory Clock | 7010 mhz | 7000 mhz | 7000 mhz | 7000 mhz | 7000 mhz |
| Memory Bandwidth | 112.16 GB/sec | 224 GB/s | 224 GB/sec | 336.5 GB/sec | 336.5 GB/sec |
| Bus Width | 128bit | 256bit | 256bit | 384bit | 384bit |
| ROPs | 32 | 56 | 64 | 96 | 96 |
| Manufacturing Process | 28nm | 28nm | 28nm | 28nm | 28nm |
| TDP | 120 watts | 145 watts | 165 watts | 250 watts | 250 watts |
The Nvidia GTX980 Ti ships with 2816 CUDA cores and 22 SM units. The memory subsystem of the GTX980 Ti consists of six 64-bit memory controllers (384-bit) with 6GB of GDDR5 memory.
The Asus ROG Matrix GTX 980Ti Platinum Edition has received a clock boost over Nvidia’s reference card, with final speeds set at 1,216mhz (core)/1,317mhz (boost). The memory is boosted from reference speeds of 1,753mhz (7Gbps effective) to 1,800 mhz (7,2Gbps effective).
For the last week we have been retesting many graphics cards with the latest AMD and Nvidia drivers and have made the switch to the 64 bit Windows 10 operating system as well. We compare the Asus ROG Matrix GTX 980Ti Platinum Edition against a plethora of high end solutions, including, but not limited to the AMD Fury X, Nvidia Titan X, Nvidia Titan Z, AMD R9 295X2, Nvidia GTX980 Ti, AMD R9 390X and AMD R9 390.