With a flurry of cards hitting shelves this holiday season, graphics card manufacturer
Asus seem to be trying their best to grab attention with their EN9800GT Matrix. The engineers at Asus even seem to have drawn inspiration from the movie 'The Matrix' in designing the card's custom cooler.

Features

Feature-wise, the EN9800GT Matrix has nothing new to offer since the 9800GT is the same as the old 8800GT GPU. The only difference between the two would be the smaller 55nm manufacturing process, but there are a few innovative enhancements made on the Asus EN9800GT Matrix.

While the card is based on the G92 GPU, Asus has implemented a few interesting improvemen'ts to the reference design. The memory chips are cooled by the aluminum heatsink while a copper plate with heat pipes takes care of the GPU. The card comes with a chip that detects the GPU, memory and ambient temperatures in real time. This allows it to either cool the GPU passively or actively. Another innovative feature is a multi-level voltage adjustment chip that adjusts the GPU and memory voltages on the fly, allowing the card to automatically switch between power saving and performance modes. Finally, the rear panel has a unique set of connectors including the regular S-Video and DVI outputs as well as HDMI and an SPDIF port for high-definition sound.

The card comes with two hardware monitoring and adjustment utilities called iTracker and GamerOSD. iTracker has four different preset modes: gamer, optimized, power saving and default, while a fifth mode, i.e. the manual mode, gives you the freedom to adjust not only the GPU, memory and shader speeds, but also their individual voltages, on the fly. GamerOSD on the other hand is capable of displaying the fps output in real time, plus it also allows you to adjust the gamma, brightness and contrast settings. Another good feature of GamerOSD is its ability to transmit video of your gameplay via a LAN.



The Asus EN9800GT Matrix has 112 stream processors running on a 256-bit bus. The core is clocked at 612 MHz with the memory and shaders running at 1800 MHz and 1512 MHz respectively. If you notice the core and shader speeds, the 9800GT is clocked just 12 MHz higher than the 8800GT in its default mode. In gamer mode though, things take a different turn with the core, memory and shader speeds bumped up to 630 MHz, 1856 MHz and 1566 MHz respectively.

Performance

Even with the speeds bumped up in gamer mode, the EN9800GT didn't quite handle games the way we expected. Crysis stuttered at 16 frames per second with quality settings set to Very High and the resolution set to 1680x1050. Taking the settings down a notch to High gave us a 14 fps boost in frame rates, thus giving us a playable rate of 30 fps. Going by the scores, the Asus EN9800GT Matrix will be able to handle most games at moderately high settings and resolutions of up to 1680x1050.