ASUS Ares rattles Graphics Card Market

Nvidia's arguably the crown of glory as the holder obtained the graphics card fastest single-GPU since the launch of the GeForce GTX480, but actually it is more worthy of occupying a throne which is the output graphics card AMD, ATI Radeon 5970 which is basically a dual-GPU graphics card (5870 x2).

Despite holding the reins of leadership 5970 graphics card, still have only a graphics card vendors strive to exceed these limits. ASUS is one graphics card vendor ATI, and as one of the first, announcing these sophisticated products. They gave the name of Ares, and some websites have even reviewed the performance of these Ares.

Ares is a limited edition graphics card with two GPUs Cypress, each running at 850MHz frequency. Ares is far more sophisticated than his brother fellow 5970, because it has a memory capacity of 4GB DDR5. Memory interface is available to two pieces, each of 256bit and has a memory clock of 4.8GHz. Then, reaching a maximum resolution of 2560x1600 pixels generated and certainly already has a native HDCP and HDMI specifications.

Ares spelled physically larger size than most high-end graphics card. 11x5-inch cross section was achieved and can spend three PCI slots. This is reasonable, considering that Ares has the heat pipe cooling system and large-sized fan.

There are some important things to consider in buying Ares, besides the price of one of them is a huge power needs. At least Ares must be supplied by the PSU for 750W. Power connector is required as many as three pieces, with two pieces connector 8-pin and a 6-pin connector.

Ares synthesis benchmark results combined with the Intel Core i7-930 (3.8GHZ), broke the 15 000 on the test with 3D Mark Vantage. Meanwhile, if paired with the Intel Core i7-980X (six-cores), reaching a significant increase to over 25,000. The test of a real game using the game HAWX (quoted from www.techpowerup.com) can be viewed on the screen shot below:

From the test results of real games shown a significant difference in performance with the ATI 5970 champ far surpasses even the standard NVidia, GeForce GTX480. Therefore not surprising that ASUS sell with exorbitant price of $ 1,200.