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ASUS EN9800GT Matrix - Is This 'The One'?

By Kenny Yeo - 20 Oct 2008

Temperature, Power Consumption & Overclocking

Temperature, Power Consumption & Overclocking

As for temperature testing, the ASUS EN9800GT Matrix recorded an operating temperature of 64 degrees Celsius, which makes it a little better than the Zotac GeForce 9800 GT AMP! Edition, which, remember, sports a single slot reference cooler. Additionally the Zotac card is also the most aggressively overclocked of the bunch here, coming in at 700MHz at the core, 2000MHz DDR at the memory and 1700MHz at the shaders. This clockspeeds are significantly higher than the ASUS EN9800GT Matrix's. Having said that, we were disappointed with ASUS' Hybrid Cooler.

Power consumption is where the ASUS EN9800GT Matrix performed the best, where its power ratings were only slightly higher than those of the engineering sample and is quite clearly the lowest amongst our bunch of GeForce 9800 GT cards, although the Zotac GeForce 9800 GT AMP! Edition was not too far off. This certainly looks like the Super Hybrid Engine is working its charms in both 2D and 3D but is at the expense of performance? The more we analyze the results, the more it seems to be the case.

Remember what ASUS said about its Super Hybrid Engine? ASUS believes that with it, the EN9800GT Matrix can be easily overclocked to 750MHz at the core, 2000MHz DDR at the memory and 1753MHz at the shaders. But unfortunately, we didn't manage to push it that far and managed to get it up only to 710MHz at the core and 1960MHz DDR at the memory, giving us only little boost in performance. Note that these overclocks are lower than what other competing GeForce 9800 GT cards had managed, which brings us back to the point of the Super Hybrid Engine which looks like it is actually hindering the card's capabilities instead of helping it.

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