ASUS Ares - God of War Cometh
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Conclusion
Godly Fast
As we expected, the ASUS Ares is comparable to twin Radeon HD 5870 cards in CrossFireX (once you factor in the drver differences) and significantly quicker than the Radeon HD 5970. Hence, the Ares is easily the most powerful and fastest single graphics card in the world, trumping the slower clocked Radeon HD 5970.
What’s more, its operating temperature of a mere 60 degrees Celsius is amazing for a card boasting two high-end GPUs on a single PCB, and we were impressed by its overclocking abilities. To be able to hit 960MHz at the both cores and 5120MHz DDR at the memory, is a commendable feat that most single-GPU Radeon HD 5870 cards are not even capable of. Hence, the Ares is quite possibly the single most performance-focused card in the market and we're giving it the Innovative Award for the engineering that went into making this card.
There are, however, a couple of drawbacks to this ferociously quick card. For one, mounting the card on your motherboard without any additional support might cause the card’s PCIe connector to break under its own titanic weight.
And then there’s its cooler. As a triple-slot cooler, it means possibly forgoing a neighbouring PCIe x16 slot; furthermore, the cooler is also unbearably noisy when the card is taxed. It sounds like it’s going to take off. We recommended that you use headphones because the noise it makes is loud enough to be a proper nuisance.
Then there's also power considerations. It's maximum power draw reading of 411W is surpasses that of two Radeon HD 5870 in CrossFireX configuration and is substantially more than a Radeon HD 5970, which manages a more modest 289W. This means the Ares requires a beefier PSU.
And then its price - a whopping S$1999. For that money, you could get two Radeon HD 5970 cards, or easily get three Radeon HD 5870 for a 3-way CrossFireX setup. But even if you were willing to shell out the cash, the bad news is that ASUS only made 1000 Ares cards worldwide and all of them have already been accounted for. So the only way you are going to get one is off the second-hand market.
The Ares, therefore, lives up to its godly name and is not for mere mortals. Instead, it is for hardcore enthusiasts who can appreciate the amount of engineering that went into this card and the sheer unrivaled performance it delivers for a single graphics card.
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