GTX285 SLI on Intel Core i7 975XE

WHILE THE ATI HD5870 LAUNCH stole the graphics headlines this past month, Nvidia is still doing pretty well with the GTX285, its flagship single GPU solution based on the GT200b chip.

Or, to be more precise, the major OEMs are putting out their own vastly improved versions to boost performance of the chip prior to the somewhat (*cough*) delayed arrival of Nvidia's next generation GT300 GPU series. Most of them, like Asus, Gigabyte and EVGA, have created optimised custom versions combining higher-bin GPUs with improved board design, better components, faster memory and usually a complete cooling replacement. And, oh yes, proper utilities for avid gamers to manage performance - and hopefully stability - in real time as they play.

The only problem is that, in both the Nvidia and ATI camps, such advanced solutions are seemingly allowed to appear only half a year or more after the actual reference card arrives, which is often too little, too late.

This is the Asus Matrix GTX285, probably the fastest GTX285 card around. It's a completely redesigned board with Japanese capacitors, lower GPU power noise, and real-time voltage and overclocking control, combined with a brand new 8mm thick dual heatpipe cooling system and a GPU settings reset button on the back. Here we have not one, but two of them in SLI, were running on the Core i7 975XE, the top end Intel desktop CPU and the Asus Rampage II Extreme, the top end Asus desktop mainboard. To complete the test setup we used 12GB of Kingston DDR3-2000 Core i7 compatible memory.

The Asus card doesn't look remotely like any other GTX285 unit. The cooling system is larger and even visually looks more robust, yet the temperature on the GPU was between 11 and 14 degrees cooler, even when overclocked. So, the Asus ROG graphics team did some nifty design wizardry there, something I hope Nvidia will appreciate to have available right at the GT300 launch, in view of the ATI competition at the present moment.

So, rather than stick to the typical GPU speed here, I went straight with 705MHz GPU speed and correspondingly sped up memory at GGRD3-2523 and shader clocks at 1572 MHz, then ran the usual 3Dmark Vantage in both Performance and Extreme modes. I have adjusted the voltages for the GPU and memory up a little bit, but nothing extreme. I was keen to see how far it will go above the generic GTX285, and how close to the new ATI Radeon HD5870, which, by the way, seems to overclock well too.