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.