Welcome to the first half of our 580 Faceoff. There are many high-performance graphics cards out there, and the NVIDIA GTX 580 is one of the best. Many manufacturers have made their own versions of the GTX 580, so how do we know which card to buy? This week, we’ll be taking a look at two of the best: the ASUS Matrix GTX 580 Platinum, and the GIGABYTE GTX 580 SOC, and pitting them head to head.

The Republic of Gamers is the premier gaming and performance hardware line from ASUS. The ROG lineup consists of the very top end of the ASUS engineering capability. The ROG lineup consists mostly of motherboards, and it wasn’t until very recently that we saw high performance graphics cards added to the mix. However, one thing that we notice is when ASUS designs a custom model of a card they go all out. this can be seen with previous ASUS custom model cards such as the ASUS Aries and Mars series cards which were very limited, expensive, and top performers. The card we have today is the ASUS Matrix GTX 580 Platinum which is the top single-GPU card in the ASUS lineup at this time.

In this review we will look at some of the unique features that separate the ASUS Matrix GTX 580 Platinum graphics card from a reference card and how can users utilize those features. This card retails for $529.99, which is only 20 dollars more than the DirectCU II card and about 70 dollars more than a reference card, which retails for about 459.99.

• READ MORE (Source): ASUS Matrix GTX 580 Platinum – Bjorn3D.com