ASUS ARES 4 GB

Introduction

Graphics card product designers at ASUS have the good life. When not placing ASUS stickers on reference design graphics cards, the engineers have all the time and resources to develop some of the most audacious and exorbitant graphics cards in the market, asserting the company's position as a market leader. With the ASUS ARES, it's the same. Pairing two AMD Cypress GPUs that carry the same specifications as the Cypress in its single-chip graphics card (Radeon HD 5870), the ASUS ARES aims to eliminate all the constraints GPU vendors come across when designing dual-GPU graphics cards, such as limited thermal and electrical budgets, which often are met by lowering clock-speeds or components inside the GPU.

ARES, is "Radeon HD 5870 X2" in its truest sense. The name "Ares" comes from Greek mythology, the God of Warfare. The older über-product from ASUS was named after Mars, the Roman God of war. By giving this a product name that precedes any company reference name (such as Radeon HD 5970 or dual-HD 5870), ASUS is giving its ARES a distinct identity that will help seat it in the upper-most quadrant of the market.

Today we will put the ASUS ARES through its paces, and watch it battle it out of a host of GPU-intensive tests. We also have an ASUS ARES CrossFire review where we test two of these beasts in a 4-GPU CrossFire configuration.

	Radeon HD 5850	GeForce GTX 470	Radeon HD 5870	GeForce GTX 480	Radeon HD 5970	ASUS ARES
Shader units	1440	448	1600	480	2x 1600	2x 1600
ROPs	32	40	32	48	2x 32	2x 32
GPU	Cypress	GF100	Cypress	GF100	2x Cypress	2x Cypress
Transistors	2154M	3200M	2154M	3200M	2x 2154M	2x 2154M
Memory Size	1024 MB	1280 MB	1024 MB	1536 MB	2x 1024 MB	2x 2048 MB
Memory Bus Width	256 bit	320 bit	256 bit	384 bit	2x 256 bit	2x 256 bit
Core Clock	725 MHz	607 MHz	850 MHz	700 MHz	725 MHz	850 MHz
Memory Clock	1000 MHz	837 MHz	1200 MHz	924 MHz	1000 MHz	1200 MHz
Price	$310	$349	$400	$499	$630	$1000