Product Showcase

Product Showcase

The ARES II is a 2x3 GB = 6 GB model graphics card. We expect the product to retail for roughly "we think" 1000~1750 EUR in the launch phase, if you can find them at all that is. There is very limited availibility and these are custom made, only a thousand pieces!

ASUS is using a hybrid liquid cooling system, that means a two-block water cooling system (one for each GPU) plus air cooling for the VRM's area on the PCB So the GPU is staying nice and cool with the water cooler and the VRM circuitry is chilled by a swift breeze of air flow. This hybrid cooler features an 80mm fan to drive the air and reminds us quite a bit about the recently tested Arctic Hybrid cooling solutions. We know for a fact though that the liquid cooler of the ARES II was developed with ASETEK.

As you can see everything is customized on the card alright, it's big and heavy. The ARES II is measuring 300 x 145 x 45mm and eating away two PCIe slots, it weighs in at a hefty 2.2kg per card.The outer shell and backside backplate are made out of aluminum.

The cards has that recognizable dark/red looking ROG theme. The card has two 4.3 Billion transistor encounting 28nm Tahiti XT2 based GPU cores tied to a whopping 3GB memory per GPU, thus 6 GB in total.

Now the reference 7970 cards are clocked at a 925 MHz core frequency, the GHz edition may clock to 1000~1050 MHz and this puppy clocks towards 1100 MHz. The GDDR5 memory runs at a cool 6600 Gbps. The memory is running on a 384-bit bus per GPU.

Here we can see the backside, the card will fit pretty much any chassis as its 30cm in length. A backplate is applied. The card screams sturdiness from A to Z. The ASUS ARES II features two DVI ports and four DisplayPort connectors. This gives the ASUS ARES II the ability to drive six monitors at one time.If you are on a high-resolution 30" 2560x1600 monitor, we striongly recommend connecting through the Display port connectors.

The ARES II has a maximum power consumption of give or take 500 Watts, our measurements actually show numbers very close to that value as we measured 470 Watt under peak gaming load. The board's overall power consumption from idle to load is quite normal, roughly 20 Watt in idle and when the monitor goes into sleep mode just 3 Watt.