With the explosion of GPU chipsets, manufacturers are hard at work to bring out their secret weapon that will sweep buyers off their feet and buy their video cards instead of a competitor's card. One company that has been releasing computer components and more for some time, has taken its current graphics cards and designed them to appeal to these gamers on a more personal level. Most gamers are not happy with stock components and tend to push their hardware to the limits. One GPU in particular has been very overclocking friendly. ASUS, building off on its famous republic of gamers brand, has released a Radeon HD 4850 card aimed at those of us with that itch to push our hardware. - Overclockers Club

ASUS Extreme AH4850 Matrix Cooling Series Review

This new board is the ASUS Extreme AH4850 Matrix edition. So what is so special? Well this signifies the Matrix series by ASUS, which uses hardware and software to allow you to push your card to the maximum potential easier and with more overall control. The Radeon HD 4850 Matrix takes the stock Radeon HD 4850 core design and expands on it, allowing it to be tweaked to higher speeds and run cooler than ever before. Since this is a brand new card, ASUS sent us the Radeon HD 4850 and accessories without retail packaging. At first glance you can see the massive heatsink that is attached, the key point as such.

The Extreme AH4850 Matrix uses a dual slot cooling solution to keep the card's temperatures as low as possible, especially when overclocking. Now the ASUS Extreme AH4850 Matrix uses the same GPU core that is used in the faster Radeon HD 4870 video cards so there will hopefully be some nice overclocking potential. ASUS used a black colored PC board instead of the traditional red color that we see on a lot of ATI based cards from other manufacturers. However, what really sets this card apart from the other Radeon HD 4850's on the market is the software that ASUS uses to monitor and overclock the Matrix series.

The Extreme AH4850 Matrix comes with the same clock speeds as the stock cards, but bumps it up with special overclocking features via the software, energy saving features and the ASUS hybrid cooling system. To power the Extreme AH4850 Matrix you still need to provide the 6-pin PCI Express power connection as in other cards. On the top spine of the card you will find the two notches for the CrossFire connectors, which allow you to combine multiple boards for a powerful multi GPU system. Near the front of the PC board is a special little chip called the ASUS super hybrid engine which controls the interactions.

This card took everything we threw at it and begged for more. The final overclock was 730MHz on the GPU and 2196MHz on the memory. The other Radeon HD 4850 that was compared in our article topped out at 675/2150MHz, so the ASUS Extreme AH4850 Matrix definitely has some juice to put out. The ASUS Extreme AH4850 Matrix board is definitely one of a kind. The power is there when it is needed and you can conserve that energy when it is not. We have used a lot of Radeon HD 4850 series cards and while the stock performance is even with other cards of its kind, the overclocking performance was out of this world.

Using the iTracker program is like child's play with the Extreme AH4850 Matrix card. The hybrid cooler keeps your card at optimum temperatures while pushing it to its limits. The video card is hard to find on the market, however it should be for sale for around $189, which is more than other Radeon HD 4850 cards with similar specifications, including the ASUS Extreme AH4850 TOP edition that is already pre-overclocked. The stock performance was average for a Radeon HD 4850 so it would have been nice to see the Extreme AH4850 Matrix card pre-overclocked as well since it is a special edition card which deserves it.

Now there are a lot of features available with the Matrix version, starting from the unique cooling solution down to the way it handles power when not being used to its fullest. The use of the super hybrid engine chip on board works similarly to the EPU on motherboards. Overall this is just a great graphics card and with the overclocking potential makes it even better than ever. You get what you pay for and with this card you get a nice performing GPU at the stock speeds and when you are ready to rock and roll the additional power is there.