PC Zenith v4

While ATI has been releasing a constant stream of new GPUs based on their new RV770 foundation chip, NVIDIA has instead chosen the path of the dark side, taking the easy way out and renaming and rehashing old products. At the time of writing, we’ve just received a working sample of ATI’s soon-to-be-released Radeon HD 4830 that we suspect will go head-to-head with the GeForce 9800 GT. As of now, the gap between the HD 4850 and HD 4670 is simply too wide, leaving NVIDIA free rein that area with their 9800 GT and 9600 GSO models. In view of that, in order to stand up to the oncoming onslaught that is the Radeon HD 4830, ASUS needs their EN9800GT Matrix to be something special, but sadly, it isn’t. It showed a lot of promise, with some very nifty features such as the automatic throttling of GPU clockspeeds and memory voltages, but we discovered, much to our dismay, that it didn’t work as well as it should. More puzzling however is the disappointing performance put in by the card. Admittedly a 12MHz overclock might not be much, but we were taken aback by how it time and time again was bettered by the reference clocked Gigabyte 9800 GT. We expected it to be at least on par. ASUS EN9800GT Matrix @ HardwareZone