Sneak preview ASUS ARES II

ASUS will be launching the ASUS ARES II / ARES 2 next week. This will be a very limited series of dual-GPU based graphics cards. Fully customized with 3rd party cooling. This product is based on two Tahiti XT2 GPUs, meaning that it’s clocked higher than one GHz with the ability to Boost the core clock frequency. To prevent the card from getting too warm and to preserve a nice tweak a liquid cooling solution has been implemented as well. From the ARES II (located under SKU/Product code ARES2-6GD5) only a thousand units will be made. Have a peek after the break at some photo's, part of an article to come next week.

The ARES II (ARES2-6GD5) features not one, but two Tahiti XT2 GPUs, the Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition GPUs. Interesting is that the card has 6 GB of GDDR5 memory, clocked at a whopping 6.6 GHz. That would mean each GPU has a 3GB memory partition.

Let's get this right out of the way:

• GPU Base Clock : 1050 MHz
• GPU Boost Clock : 1100 MHz

The ROG ARES II is packed in an silver briefcase, which kinda reminded me of the hitman game to carry around its guns :)

The ARES II is measuring 300 x 145 x 45mm and eating away only  two PCIe slots, it weighs in at a hefty 2.2kg per card though! Though the GPus are liquid cooled there is a 80mm fan to keep the heatsinks and VRM zone at acceptable operating temperatures. Anyway, we can't spill the beans too much, next week the fill review. For now please have a peek at some in-house photo's.