Asus (TPE:2357) today announced the company’s new flagship graphics card with a single GPU: the GTX 980 Republic of Gamers (ROG) Matrix Platinum.  The custom designed card comes with a massive boost clock of 1342 MHz, and is cooled by a custom air cooler fed by 10mm heat pipes.

This is its third custom designed GTX 980, as the Poseidon and Strix OC versions have been out for a while now.  The card comes factory overclocked with a massive boost clock of 1342 MHz, although the base clock was not disclosed the memory has been left at the standard clock speed of 7 GHz.  The custom PCB has a 14 phase VRM to provide the card with stable power, and it requires two 8-pin PCI-E to power the card.  A unique feature meant for the most extreme users are the resistive traces in the PCB to keep the card warm enough to prevent frost when the card is used under LN2 (liquid nitrogen) cooling.

The cooling is taken care of by a custom air cooler with a high density fin-stack heatsink fed by 10mm thick heat pipes.  The two Asus designed fans that cool the heatsink are CoolTech hybrid fans that are designed to force air not only down but to the sides, essentially pushing air in an 180 degree arc.  The heatsink has been nicely finished in black, making the overall aesthetic much nicer.  Users will also appreciate that the card comes with a back-plate and a brace for the card which should help to prevent sagging.  Back-plates have been a noticeable addition to cards that consumers are getting more concerned about.  It not only can make the graphics cards much nicer when inside a windowed case but at times they can help with a bit of cooling if there are components on the back of the card.

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For a company called Colorful, being subtle is out of the question. It comes as no surprise, then, that the vendor’s variant of the Nvidia GTX 980, dubbed the iGame GTX 980, is one of the most over the top video cards you can buy today.

Featuring a massive cooling solution and a 14-phase VRM that makes other vendor-based GTX 980 cards look small by comparison, Colorful didn’t hold back on any segment when designing the iGame GTX 980. The non-reference PCB designed by Colorful features pure silver traces, the monster-sized VRM that draws power from two 8-pin PCIe inputs, server-grade tantalum capacitors, high-grade DPAK MOSFETs and high-current solid-chokes.

Colorful also managed to overclock the card, which is accessible the card through a dual-BIOS mode. The first BIOS runs the card at 1127 MHz core and 1216 MHz, while the second BIOS overclocks the GPU to 1178 MHz core and 1279 MHz boost. The memory clock in the first BIOS is 7 GHz, while it sees an incremental increase to 7.01 GHz in the second BIOS.

One of the main facets of this card is the large headroom that is available to enthusiast users looking to overclock the card. The iGame GTX 980 comes with a compound aluminum fin-stack heatsink and three 100 mm fans that ensure the card doesn’t get excessively warm even under heavy load. The back features a solid metal back plate along with a dotted mesh design.

In terms of connectivity, Colorful is offering three DisplayPort 1.2 ports, one HDMI 2.0 and one dual-link DVI connector. No word on pricing yet, but it is likely that the iGame GTX 980 will be one of the highest priced versions of the GTX 980 on offer.

If the iGame GTX 980 doesn’t quite cut it for you, you’ll be glad to know that Colorful is working on an even faster variant called the GTX 980 iGame Kudan. We’ll share more details as we receive them.

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