All the while, gamers were only concerned about whether a graphics card could deliver the power they needed for the latest games. But after one need is satisfied, another comes up. It wasn’t just performance that gamers were bothered with, now there was the issue of overheating, design, noise, etc. Come today, people are now more inclined to tweak their own cards to boost performance. It was this that gave birth to the Republic of Gamers by ASUS. This month we get our hands on the 9600GT Matrix from the ROG series!
The philosophy of ROG is to provide hardcore gamers and enthusiasts alike, the control over their gaming hardware and every aspect of it. This is evident in most of the ROG motherboards that we’ve tested and suffice to say, ASUS has done an excellent job. The first thing about ROG products is their strikingly cool appearances. Particularly noteworthy is the cooling solution on the 9600GT Matrix dubbed the Hybrid Cooler. This contraption is a combination of heatpipes, heatfins and a 60mm fan, encased under a black coloured enclosure. Because of the way it’s designed, the card takes up two expansion slots. The card sports a good range of connectors such as a DVI port, a HDMI port, an S-Video port and an S/PDIF out. Although everything has been fancy up to this point, the one thing I noticed is that four of the GDDR3 memory chips are placed on the other side of the PCB. There are eight 64MB chips altogether that make up the 512MB of memory on the card, so half of them are cooled while the rest are not (the heck?!); highly unusual for an ASUS product.
However, the design of the Matrix card isn’t the main highlight; it’s the software that comes with it. ASUS bundles an application called the iTracker, which grants gamers total control over their card, from overclocking, adjusting fan speeds, monitoring temperatures, controlling voltages…the works people. For amateur users or those who want to avoid the hassle, ASUS offers four default profiles, each catering to specific workloads. Once you’re up to it, you can start creating your own profile with your own configurations. With the Super Hybrid Engine technology, you get plenty of headroom to overclock the card. We haven’t done so ourselves, but other sites have indicated that the overclocking potential is very good.
Performance, performance, performance, is it not the main factor of a graphics card? Given that the 9600GT Matrix belongs to the lower-end segment of the video card market, we don’t expect it to be outstanding. On 3DMark Vantage, it scored 4,702 and 2,839 on Performance and High preset respectively. For games testing, the card did moderately well with World in Conflict and Supreme Commander, though Crysis caused it to strain at higher resolutions. So you should be wary if you intend to play games of the same calibre as Crysis. Under heavy load, the card’s temperature went up to 62°C, which is a let down as the Zotac 9600GT achieved the same temperature readings and it’s only a single-slot card. One thing dislikeable is the amount of noise it makes during gaming so take note.
The 9600GT Matrix package is quite awesome overall, but for a couple more dollars, you can actually get a regular 9800GTX+. Sure, it doesn’t have all the nifty features like the 9600GT Matrix, but more often than not, people prefer performance over anything else. For the average gamer, this is perfect if you want to tweak your card. If not, ASUS has a 9800GT Matrix, which we are hoping to get in the near future.
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