If there is one word to describe ASUS's latest attempt at resurrecting the Olympian God of War, Ares, it would be 'heavy'. That is no hyperbole given that all who attended the seminar were taken back by its sheer weight. The closest people will get to experiencing this £1000 monster of a graphics card would be to actually hold a brick. But ASUS know that already. What Ares represents is much more. It is a window into the company's design philosophy and ingenuity, the former being a recurrent theme throughout the event. If the card looks familiar to you, it's because the Ares takes its design cue for ASUS's first attempt at a dual GPU board, the ASUS EN7800GT Dual.
ASUS EN7800GT Dual
So what exactly is Ares? Following in the footstep of the ASUS Mars (Roman God of War), which was two GTX285 cores on one card to create a superior GTX295 (rather than two GTX275 cores), the company has decided to shift its attention to ATI. The current flagship HD5970 is made of two HD5870 cores on a single PCB but to stay within the ATX power specifications, the cores had to be clocked down to HD5850 levels at 750MHz. The brilliance behind the HD5970 is that it retains all the 1600 stream processors of the HD5870 core and its other attributes. However, ASUS decided that they had to create a card which wasn't compromised in any way, hence the birth of the Ares HD5970.
Specfications:
-Dual Radeon HD5870
-2x 1600 stream processors
-850MHz engine clock
-4.8GHz memory clock
-4096MB GDDR5
The most notable changes to the reference HD5970 specifications are the higher engine clock at 850MHz and the 4GB of GDDR5 memory as opposed to 2GB.
The ASUS Ares HD5970
The ASUS Ares may not boast the most impressive HD5970 specifications (The new Sapphire HD5970 Toxic holds that crown) but it certainly holds the best designs and features. Instead of opting for third party coolers, ASUS designed their own cooler to meet their needs. Beneath the shroud are two large copper heatsinks on each core and 4 thick heat pipes on each for more efficient heat transfer (now you know why it's heavy!). The central fan has been optimised for much higher airflow than the reference HD5970 while still delivering lower acoustics. The card boasts 1x HDMI, 1x DisplayPort and 1x dual link DVI-I display connectors, akin to the reference HD5870 I/O plate as opposed to the HD5970's.
Two large copper heatsinks with 4 heat pipes each
Notice that the card is wider to minimise its length
It seems ASUS learnt a lot from the GTX295 experience to deliver a much better cooling solution on Ares. Their claims of significantly improved performance are yet to be tested but if I have learnt anything from my cooler reviews, it's that large copper blocks and heat pipes are very efficient at taming the hottest components.
