I love looking at new cards and most are minor upgrades to the reference model while others are a bit better with custom PCBs and some minor trickery to help performance. Some are simply balls to the walls complete ground up builds made specifically for pushing the limits, and today that's what we have. ASUS always aims to impress with its top model ROG based overclocking cards and the last few Matrix cards we have seen have been very impressive, so needless to say when I had the GTX 980 variant show up I was elated and very anxious to get to running it.

One thing up front is that while this card comes with an air cooler this card and cards like it are designed to really push the limit of a specific platform or GPU model so the real target would be LN2 testing but as that group is extremely niche we have to look at it under real world application and expectations. Our testing and analysis will be on its stock air cooling and if we can round up a waterblock we will be sure to follow up with another performance analysis with that as well.