Ok, 1st things 1st... Congratulations, as always, for the great review. Now...talking about this card is really a mix of feelings, one surelly must be amazed by the technological achivment the guys ASUS/ROG achieved, and yes it's faster (altough less stable) than the 690..but this propt us for the important question, when we say what's the faster generic mainstream card in existance, one can't say it's the ARES II, cause the truth is that this is NOT a mainstream/generic card!...it's a tuned version of a deadborn child AMD never gave birth, ence if we talk about GPU manufaturers, the crown still belongs to Nvidia, and the fastest graphic card (generic/mainstream) is the 690GTX..periood! I can understand reviews comparing "normal" cards with tecnological excentricites like this one, for the sake of amusment, but not as term inlightning people of what is the current market standards... ...using a very apropriate comparison with cars...it's like if someone was making a comparison between a Ferrari 458 vs Porsche 911, (usually the "normal" 458 is faster than the 911) and had choosen to do so, picking a out of the box/factory standard Ferrari 458, vs a special tuned 911 (like the 9ff TR-1000) wich some german special tune company had made....of course the tuned, exclusivist special made for 10 people, Porsche would have won it!...and surelly that car will be effectivlly measured as the fastes of both, but seriouly people that wouldn't be a "truth" test and not been very correct/serious on the part of the testers, would it?!?... ...besides not hiding the fact that, the Ferrari 458 was in truth the fastest out of the box car! Truth is, Nvidia knows it made also a tecnological achivment in the 690GTX, and better still, without having the kneed to use special divisions on outside companies to build what themeselves couldn't make it work, and by means of make it absolutly unafordable to the bystandard user, either by the price itself, as for other system requirments like special PSU's, and so on... I agree that ROG/ASUS put together a magnificent product, but IMHO the technological achievment prize goes to Nvidia, because it made an almost equal performant card, using less sophisticated/exclusivist cooling, (LOT) less use of energy power, and at a price (in some cases) almost half of the cost of the so called WONDER ARES II....if you don't agree with me fine, but what would you call a normal 690GTX user who spent 700Eur, and with just a few cliks on GPU tweak, would outperform the new 1400Eur "golden boy" ARES II, using the same or less amount of energy power and a 850 PSU?!?...a superb engineer, or a SUPER WONDER piece of tecnological?!?lol...i think not, do you?!:3eyes: Oh before someone starts a RED/Green bashing, i have to reveal that i'm a happy ATI customer by the way!lol What i'm also, is a non-biased person that see things in a broader spectrum and likes to compare things..that are comparable...THANKS PS-Oh, not to mention that the 10-15% margin of win ARES II had, was almost destroyed a few hours later when Nvidia released Beta drivers 313.96 wich improoves particullary the 690GTX model....call that a coincidence?!?Lol