Getting the ASUS ARES is certainly not a reasonable thing to do. But why would anyone get a Ferrari? OK, the ARES doesn't get you girls, but it is certainly built to impress. Everything about this card screams "premium", for example the metal case it comes in, which presents the card like your weapon of choice, and then there is the excellent build quality. Even if you just hold it in your hands, you get a warm and cozy feeling thank to its weight, making you want to run away with it to your hidden benchmarking lab (happened to me at Computex). But don't forget to have plenty of power in your underground bunker. With a power consumption of over 450W in Furmark, it might make your neighbours' lights go dim when turned on. Good that ASUS put plenty of power connectors on the card, 2x 8-pin and 1x 6-pin are specified to provide at least 450W to the card. Of course power consumption during normal use is not as epic as in Furmark, but a good quality power supply is a must.
In terms of performance out of the box the card does well delivering about 10% over the HD 5970, but that's not where the road ends. ASUS has specifically designed their card for overclocking, which means that with a little bit of tweaking and testing you can get a good chunk of extra performance out of it - why leave your shiny sports car at stock? Compared to the HD 5970, the overclocking limits are massively increased. Whereas our HD 5970 reference card would only reach 780 MHz maximum overclock, the ASUS ARES managed 950 MHz - that's 170 MHz more! Thanks to the modular heatsink design it's easy to add more extreme forms of cooling without having to worry about cooling secondary components like memory and voltage regulation. The Ares needs to be complimented with a display of no less than 2560x1600 pixels resolution or an EyeFinity setup. Even a 27" 1080p display won't do. Otherwise, you're pretty much pulling a horse-cart with a railway locomotive instead of a horse.

But the ASUS ARES is not all gold. The price of 1000 USD alone will scare away most users without deep pockets. While it is surprisingly quiet in idle, the fan noise under load is not quiet enough to make using it a pleasant experience. But hey, big, bad cars aren't quiet either, and I need to stop with the car analogies. Being built on a dual-GPU design, the card depends on optimum driver support more than single-GPU cards. Without a CrossFire profile for your favourite game, the card will just be as fast as a normal HD 5870. Overall the ASUS ARES is an impressive feat of GPU technology and I have to applaud ASUS for going beyond high-volume reference design, carefully crafting a beast of a graphics card that requires deep pockets and a hardware enthusiast to work at its best.