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.

Packaging

The ARES comes in a huge package that weighs about 8 kilos. On the first picture you do not get an impression for the shear size of the package, so in the second picture I put a normal sized HD 4890 box next to it.


Inside the big box you will find an aluminum suitcase that looks great and adds to the christmas feeling excitement.


Using high-precision foam cut outs, the ARES sits in the suitcase, like your secret weapon for the GPU war.

Contents

You will receive:

• Graphics card
• CrossFire Bridge
• ASUS ROG Badge
• ASUS ROG Mouse
• HDMI to DVI Adapter
• Driver CDs + Documentation
• 2x PCI-Express power cable

The Card

So you heard that the ASUS ARES is heavy - you have no idea how heavy it is. With the cooler being made from full copper the card clocks in at 2.3 kilos. To illustrate how much that is I put the ARES on the left and the equivalent weight of graphics cards on the right.


The ARES comes with an exclusive cooling solution designed by ASUS. I have to admit that is one of the sexiest cards I have seen in a long time. The build quality also feels very solid and you don't have to be afraid of breaking anything by accident.


Two high-clocked GPUs, voltage tweaking support, built for overclockers means that a three slot cooling solution is not surprise.


It seems that due to the packing method of the suitcase, there is some sticky foam near the back of the card. I also received a second card for CrossFire testing and it does not have this problem.


The card has one DVI port, one HDMI port and one DisplayPort. This is a small deviation from the HD 5970 configuration which had 2x DVI + 1x DP. ASUS has included an HDMI to DVI adapter, so no problem if you need to connect two DVI monitors.
The HDMI interface includes a 7.1 channel audio signal that is generated by an HD audio device integrated in the GPU. Unlike NVIDIA cards which limit you to two active outputs at the same time, you may use all three outputs at the same time on ATI's latest cards.


For voltmodders, ASUS has included easy to access voltage measurement spots. The selection of voltages is fairly limited though, you can only measure the voltage of each of the GPUs - no VDDCI or memory measurements.


If you need more performance and have the cash you can get a second ASUS ARES to run the cards in CrossFire.


Here are the front and the back of the card, high-res versions are also available (front, back). If you choose to use these images for voltmods etc, please include a link back to this site or let us post your article.