AMD’s Radeon 5970 dual-GPU video card is the fastest consumer graphics card available, but Asus is cooking up a customized monster that steps things up a notch. Codenamed Ares, this ‘true’ dual-5870 solution is point to leave everything else on the market in the dust.

AMD’s current 5970 GPU carries the same number of stream processors and memory as a standard 5870 but runs its core and memory 15 percent and 20 percent slower. The Ares scoffs at such limitations; Asus has combined two 5870′s back-to-back, kept them running at full speed, and slapped the whole shebang into a single PCI-Express slot.

A Pair of Radeon HD 5870 GPUs Full-Bore On One PCB

The resulting card is something of a monstrosity. At 2.5 slots thick, Ares is geared for war (pardon the pun) and easily surpasses the benchmark scores of mere standard 5970s. We were able to run 3DMark Vantage at both its “Performance” and “High” detail settings. Asus’ didn’t have a high-resolution monitor on the demo machine so we couldn’t test the program’s “Extreme” mode, but the performance and scaling we saw in the lower modes bodes well for the upper ones.

Asus isn’t sure if they’ll bring Ares to the US, but the company reps we talked to implied that yields were fairly good (keeping in mind that this is a top-margin part). We brought up the issue of power–the current 5970s are listed with a maximum board power of 294W and this card sports a third auxiliary power connection, which implies it’s already leaning pretty heavily on the power supply. According to Asus, AMD’s maximum board power supply numbers are a bit conservative; the current set of 5970s coming off the fabs are hitting around 260W at maximum power draw while the Ares is sitting just under the 300W mark.

We’d love to see Ares in the channel, but if it does become available we’d caution against using it in anything but a top-end board with a very good PSU. This is precisely the sort of situation where ‘invisible’ differences in board construction can come into play and top-end features and/or additional validation can suddenly become important.

产品物理组合立体图从这样一个立体图片中个我们能够清楚看到华硕Ares的结构设计。

华硕Ares显卡侧面图

华硕Ares显卡俯视图

华硕采用双Slot设计，为了增加产品散热效能，整个散热模块均采用纯铜材质，同时标配一个高效风扇。

华硕Ares显卡纯铜散热鳍

华硕Ares显卡核心散热模块

核心散热模块有纯铜散热鳍和纯铜热管组成

主动散热仅采用一个风扇

为玩家准备的电压测量点

如果你是一个玩家自然对产品超频感兴趣，而极限超频和电压提升息息相关，为了让玩家国度显卡给高端超频用户提供更好的产品使用体验，增加了电压测量点，方 便玩家简便的及时把握运行电压。

8pin + 8pin + 6pin的外接供电组合

高频、高性能必然需要充足的电量供给，显卡标配了双8pin和6pin的三个外接供电组合，配合PCI-Express提供的75瓦，整个显卡理论能够获 得450瓦的支持。

这也就是说，如果想发挥华硕Ares显卡的性能，搭配能够与之相匹配的其他硬件，一个额定功率不低于600瓦的电源成为必须。