Preview: ASUS MATRIX GTX580 – Better than DirectCUII?

The Matrix GTX 580 looks bad-ass, there's no way around that. According to insiders, the GPUs on the card are destined to be golden samples. The problem, however, seems to be ... software.

I'm not entirely sure about the strategy here. Oh well, maybe the software will be available in public in the next couple of days. Let's hope!

The GTX 580 MATRIX on the other hand, doesn’t have a publicly available tool that allows you to move past the 1.15V (or 1.25V or so if you use the vGPU buttons on the board) limitation set by ASUS through the BIOS. We got it from a reliable source at ASUS that the BIOS or tool that would allow higher voltages would never be made public or made available to anyone but very select overclockers (probably deemed so by ASUS). The Question, is then, are only those select members going to buy this card? Who exactly is this card for when the average buyer would do better with another overclocked card either from GIGABYTE, MSI, EVGA or any other manufacturer for that matter.

So this card is technically as perfect as a GTX580 can be, but practically no better than the card ASUS took out before and less in many ways because unlike the DCUII, if you’re not an ASUS VIP of sorts, forget about getting any useful sub zero performance out of it. Let’s see if this situation changes before our full review but as it stands you’d be mistaken to pick this over the Fantastic ASUS GTX580 DirectCUII