Gigabyte GeForce GTX 770 (GV-N770OC-2GD) vs. ASUS Matrix Platinum (R9280X-P-3GD5) Video Card Review

The ASUS R9280X-P-3GD5 (part 2)

At the edge of the card there are four buttons and a series of LEDs. Two buttons are for manual voltage adjustments, and the green, yellow, and red LEDs indicate the GPU core voltage. There is one “safe mode” button that resets all clocks and voltages to their default values. The fourth button instantly sets the fans at maximum speed, which is useful if you are trying an extreme overclocking. There are also several voltage monitoring points and connectors on the card.

Figure 13: buttons and LEDs

The ASUS R9280X-P-3GD5 uses a cooler with two 100 mm fans and five 8-mm heatpipes. Under the GPU cooler, there is a second (passive) cooler that touches some of the memory chips and the voltage regulator transistors.

Figure 14: GPU cooler removed

Figure 15: memory and voltage regulator cooler removed

The video card uses a voltage regulator with 16 phases for the GPU and four phases for the memory chips. The voltage regulator circuit uses a digital design and is controlled by an Digi+ ASP1211 chip. All capacitors are solid.

Figure 16: memory chips

The reviewed video card uses 12 SK hynix H5GQ2H24AFR-ROC GDDR5 chips, each one storing 2 Gbits of data, comprising the 3 GiB of memory available on this video card. These chips can run up to 6 GHz. On this video card, they are accessed at 6.4 GHz, which means the memory is already clocked above the nominal clock of the memory chips.

Figure 17: memory chips

Before seeing the performance results, let’s recap the main features of thes tested video cards.