Monday, April 12, 2010

Asus Ares GPU packs raw power of two 5870s in one kickass package [RoG]


For hardcore PC gaming enthusiasts, there exists the ATI Radeon HD 5970, which essentially is a dual-GPU version of the AMD's fastest single graphics card, the ATI Radeon HD 5870. But while the 5970 has the same number of stream processors and memory as a standard 5870, its core and memory are running at 15 percent and 20 percent slower speeds, respectively. Not quite the true dual-graphics solution AMD fans would like it to be.

Enter the Asus Ares, a true dual-5870 solution that appears to belong to the company's Republic of Gamers brand of PC-related hardware. According to the folks from HotHardware, Asus has combined two 5870s back-to-back in the Ares GPU, enabling them to run at full speed and work from a single PCI-E graphics card slot.

Preliminary tests have shown that it pretty much beats the HD 5970 in 3DMark Vantage. The only question now is, is it still a good product when you take heat and power consumption into account? Asus hasn't mentioned when and where they will launch the dual-5870 Ares GPU first, so we probably won't find out until then.

Source: [HotHardware]