ASUS Matrix GeForce GTX 580 Unboxing & First Look Linus Tech Tips
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2012-05-07
·
1,609 words · ~8 min read
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this is the GeForce GTX 580 Matrix
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Platinum Republic of Gamers graphics card it comes in a huge box and it is a
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very special video card so it uses the GTX 580 GPU it has 1.5 gigs of memory it
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is clocked pretty high and stuff it's got a memory interface it's got maximum
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digital resolution of 2560 x600 okay it has display ported out
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which is kind of cool and a minimum of 700 wat system power supply is
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recommended for the use of this card and
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you will see why once I get it opened up
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because it's all big and impressive and consumes lots of power but it consumes
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lots of power because it's powerful so it is designed for overclocking
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enthusiasts following the success of the extreme tweet tweaker features a Seuss
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has created the new tweit to give users flexible overclocking control even when
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running Benchmark program so yes you can adjust the frequency of this card with
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onboard buttons pretty crazy am I right
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real time Hardware loading monitoring with the LEDs over here so blue is light
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loading green is safe mode pink is heavy loading blue is medium loading and red
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is Extreme loading so that actually doesn't seem to be here maybe that's
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somewhere else I guess we'll we'll check that out we'll check that out okay GPU
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tweak is their utility for overclocking it uses direct cu2 technology for the
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cooler and it has 19 phase super 19
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phases okay it has 19 phase super alloy
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power for the pwm on this card let's go
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ahead and get it opened up wow we've actually got an accessory box as well as
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a box for the card itself so because this is a GTX 580 card what that means
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is we do have support for all of NVIDIA's Technologies including 3D
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Vision 3D Vision surround if you run an SLI we do obviously have support for SLI
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up to three-way or even four-way if you have a motherboard that supports it
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you've got support for Cuda fizx all of that good stuff this is a great sticker
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check out this sticker it's all shiny and red and black looks outstanding GTX
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580 driver and manual get rid of it download the latest off the NVIDIA
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website you can just download a regular GTX 580 driver there's no need for
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special driver here's a quick setup guide we've also got a couple of dual
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six pin to 8 Pin PCI power adapters and
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we've got an SL Bridge included hey that's thoughtful okay it's a longer s
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Bridge uh we've got a DVI to VGA adapter
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although honestly guys if you're using a VGA monitor with a graphics card of this
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caliber then I would recommend a monitor
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upgrade instead of buying a graphics card of this caliber oh man this thing's
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redonkulous look at this oh so that's where your realtime loading indicator is
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O that's that's a cool feature so it actually glows a different color
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depending on how much load the graphics card is under very cool uh yeah sure
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let's start with the power connector so we have dual 8 Pin
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PCIe power connectors that are required to power this board we've also got a
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full cover back plate on the back of the board actually here yeah check that out
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that looks really sharp so you can see that it's um actually I can't tell if
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it's making contact with anything over there looks like it's not okay so this
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is mostly for looks in all likelihood but it's got ventilation holes here and
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it looks really sharp so this text is going to be right side up when it is
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installed in your case so you'll be able to read Aus Matrix GTX 580 just
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fine okay here we've got our two SLI
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connectors so that means that we do have support for multi-way SLI configurations
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not just two graphics cards this is a standard PCI E2 16x interface so this is
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not an SLI on a card it doesn't require any kind of special connector the only
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thing you really have to worry about is the power so like I said two eight pins
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all right on the back oh this is interesting it's got a safe mode button
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I guess that's for safe mode okay we have DisplayPort HDMI and dual DVI
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outputs that are covered by little blue covers by default and they're capable of
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VGA as well everything is very helpfully labeled not only on the card itself but
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also on the plastic piece here I don't know if you can read that but it says
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DVI okay and it's going to be hard for
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us to take a good look at the custom PCB that went into this but um why don't we
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look at the custom cooler first so we have dual 90 mm pwm fans here so these
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are full thickness fans these are not your slim fans that you typically see on
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these dual card uh or dual dual fan
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coolers so they're going to have some real static pressure behind them those
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are big fat heat pipes in there too I want you to kind of try and see down
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there can you see the uh the heat pipes yeah there we go so those are really fat
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heat pipes let me see how many are going to each side of the cooler so it looks
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like we've got a total of one
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2 3 4 five yeah it looks like correct me
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if I'm wrong here guys but it looks like we got five heat pipes uh two of which
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are going to this side yeah you can see the heat pipes running through here one
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wait are there ones going out the other side no yeah okay yeah you can see the termination so there's two coming out
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here remember this side also has direct heat transfer as well cuz the GPU itself
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is right down there okay and then this one has three heat pipes going through
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it so that's carrying heat away from the GPU and then out to this side where it
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will be taken away by this fan now this fan also blows down directly onto this
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heat sink that is going to be cooling the pwm it looks like the RAM chips do
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not have heat sinks on them but they are going to be actively cooled by this fan
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which can actually be better for RAM chips in some scenarios now this is a
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fully custom PCB as I mentioned before so let's start showing you some of those
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features obviously this B pwm heat sink
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is covering up B pwm which is completely
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custom for this card you don't have to worry about it blowing up pretty much no
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matter how much voltage or How much cooling and then how Much More Voltage
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you throw at it so hopefully you can see down there reasonably well okay next we
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have these buttons here so you can turn your fan to 100% with the push of a
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button that's kind of a cool feature because if you're like okay I'm gonna
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you know benchmark boom just turn your fan on all the way then you don't have to worry about it ramping up hotter and
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then catching itself to bring itself back down so you can keep it as cool as
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possible you can turn the speeds up and down you've got uh this little indicator
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set of LEDs here and then finally you've
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got ha voltage checkpoints so for GPU M
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PLL 3vt 3 3v3 12vt and ground you have
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all of those on there so let's see how these fans are hooked up I okay so this
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must be to do with this and then it looks like the fans are hooked up
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through this custom connector right here
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yeah that would be my that would be my guess so thank you for checking out my
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unboxing of the GTX 580 Matrix don't
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forget to subscribe to lus detectives for more unboxings reviews and other
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computer videos and oh yeah last thing this is a triple slot card so if you are
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going to try to run two of these in SLI make sure you have a card that has very
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very wide spacing for the PCIe 16x slots
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although really one of these cards should be providing most of the power
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you would need for a lot of the games out there these days oh look at this
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I've never seen anything this crazy before okay they've actually got labeled
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solder points for you to do volt mod on
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this thing you got to be kidding me so you can disable the ocp that is the over
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current protection uh I'm not sure what these
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other markings being power pwm you can change the pwm frequency so you can put
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a variable resistor on there and change that so no way you can't build that into
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a video card that's crazy so this thing is designed from the ground up for
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subzero that is amazing actually cool okay