Conclusion

The ASUS Matrix GTX285 has performed well in our tests, although it is overall slower than AMD’s new single-chip flagship Radeon HD 5870. We did not focus on comparing them directly, though. Instead, we tried to see what unique features and opportunities the Matrix GTX285 could offer and we did find them. ASUS’ development team have come up with a truly unique GeForce GTX 285 that differs from most other G200b-based products available on the market today.

First of all, this product is unique as it comes from the Matrix series with its extended management capabilities. You can overclock and monitor the card’s parameters, control its GPU and memory voltages, fine-tune the memory subsystem and write your own settings into the BIOS with the option of rolling back in case of a failure. All of this makes the ASUS Matrix GTX285 a highly appealing choice for every user who likes to experiment with computer hardware. Here, your experimentation is going to be safe as opposed to, for example, hardware modification of a graphics card’s power circuitry.

Particularly, we easily boosted the performance of the Matrix GTX285 by 12-14% relative to Nvidia’s reference sample by simply using the iTracker 2 capabilities.

With this performance boost, the ASUS card was confidently first among single-chip DirectX 10 solutions, being just slightly inferior to the Radeon HD 4890 in certain tests and at certain resolutions, e.g. in Call of Duty: World at War and BattleForge. We want to remind you that other sample of Matrix GTX285 can be better or worse in terms of overclocking because overclocking is largely about luck.

We have to mention the drawbacks of the device, too. We don’t mind that the card proved to be somewhat hotter and louder than the reference GeForce GTX285 but the squeaking of the voltage regulator’s chokes and the odd behavior of our testbed’s PSU after we installed our Matrix GTX285 into it are a problem. Perhaps we had a defective or presale sample of the product, but we have to mention this anyway.

Summing everything up, the ASUS Matrix GTX285 is an exciting version of GeForce GTX 285 with lots of extra features that make it appealing for overclockers. Although it is not a premium-class solution after the release of the Radeon HD 5800 series anymore, it is an original graphics card that will surely find its customer.

Asus Matrix GTX285 Summary

Highs:

• High performance in contemporary games;
• Wide range of supported FSAA modes;
• Minimal effect of enabled FSAA on performance;
• PhysX acceleration support in the GPU;
• Hardware HD-video decoding support;
• S/PDIF sound over HDMI;
• Software management of GPU and memory power supply;
• Manual adjustment of the memory timings;
• Supports user profiles for the BIOS settings;
• Protection against improper BIOS reflashing;
• Good overclocking potential;
• Visual monitoring of GPU utilization;
• Rich accessories bundle.

Lows:

• No DirectX 10.1 and Shader Model 4.1 support;
• Incomplete hardware support of VC-1 decoding;
• No integrated sound core;
• Lower efficiency of the cooling system compared with the reference one;
• Higher level of generated noise compared with the acoustics of the reference cooler;
• Higher price.