Received my new Asus Radeon Matrix 5870 Platnum (that’s a mouthful) today! Total geek moment. Now maybe I can actually run Final Fantast XIV!
When building my current computer I bought two Nvidia 8800 GTS cards and set them up to run in SLI mode. This setup had some advantages, but also gave me a lot of trouble. A lot of game don’t work with SLI, so I often had to turn it off. After a while I just gave up switching between the two settings and left it off. However, with Final Fantasy XIV around the corner I knew it was time to upgrade, but also I wanted to go back to a single card.
After some research the Radeon 5870 seemed a good fit, but which one? There are a ton of different versions of the same card! Some companies I never even heard of. Asus, however, is a brand I’ve dealt with a lot over the years. A lot of my past custom-built computers have Asus motherboards.
This Asus version of the 5870 is already over-clocked and tweaked beyond the standard card design. I don’t tend to over-clock my computers, but I wanted to get something that was as powerful without spending a lot of money on it. So I got the Asus ROG Matrix 5870 Platinum. A long fancy title, but it has a lot of good modifications to the standard 5870.
Here are some shots of my two old cards.
This card has a nice light for the name on the side of the card. It changes color depending on the load, but since my case is closed I never see it.
Right out of the box the benchmark numbers were a lot higher than before. With some of the games I tested I was able to put the settings much higher. I think it was a good upgrade. For now…
