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- Date:
- Monday , August 02, 2010
- Author:
- Mark Warner
- Editor:
- Brent Justice
- Share:
ASUS ARES Dual 5870 GPU Video Card Review
ASUS is out to dominate gaming performance with the new ASUS ARES dual-5870 GPU video card with 4GB of GDDR5 on board. Is this $1200 video card up to the task of providing a better gameplay experience over the Radeon HD 5970 and how will it compare to GTX 480 SLI considering that is a less expensive solution?
Introduction
ASUS is a Taiwanese computer hardware manufacturer, best known as a builder of high-quality mainboards for mainstream and enthusiast desktop PCs. Over the many years the company has been in business, it has expanded its business into graphics cards, sound cards, notebooks, Netbooks, displays, and many other product lines. It is perhaps one of the best-known hardware manufacturers in the business, and it would be very hard to find a gamer or other hardware enthusiast who has not owned an ASUS product, or is not familiar with the brand.
Today, we’re going to examine one of its fastest graphics cards. It is a very special product, with a very special price tag. We gave you a quick preview back in July. The video card in question is the brand new ASUS ARES, a dual-GPU product featuring two Radeon HD 5870 GPUs with 2GB of GDDR5 for each GPU, for a grand total of 4GB of memory on board. ASUS tells us it should retail for $1,200 USD. Yes, that is one thousand, two hundred whopping US dollars. You could say, "This is Radeon HD 5970 done right."
AMD’s ATI Radeon HD 5870 GPU
AMD launched the ATI Radeon HD 5870 on September 22nd of 2009. At the time, the 5000 series was the only DirectX 11 capable GPU on the market. It was also the first time we saw Eyefinity technology in a retail card. The GPU itself is comprised of 2.15 billion transistors, offering 2.7 TeraFLOPs of computational capacity. It has 1600 stream processors, 80 texture units, and 32 raster operators. The first models launched with 1GB of GDDR5 on-board, clocked to 1.2GHz, or 4.8GHz DDR, for a total of 153.6GB per second of memory bandwidth. The reference GPU clock was 850MHz at launch, and unlike NVIDIA, AMD does not use clock domains to give the streaming processors a higher clock rate than the graphics core.
The Radeon HD 5970
Two months after the successful launch of the Radeon HD 5870, AMD gave us the dual-GPU Radeon HD 5970, code-named "Hemlock." The Radeon HD 5970 is spiritually a dual-GPU HD 5870, but there are key differences. The ASIC (the actual GPU chip) is not the same, and the clock rates are pulled back. The reference GPU clock rate on the HD 5970 is 725MHz, and the memory is 4.0GHz. That is a 125MHz reduction in the GPU clock, and an 800MHz reduction in the memory clock. That clock rate reduction was performed to bring the HD 5970 below the 300W power envelope. Predictably, the Radeon HD 5970 has 3200 stream processors for a total of 4.64 TeraFLOPs of computing power. Aside from the clock rate difference, the internal specifications of the Radeon HD 5970’s ASIC are the same as that of the Radeon HD 5870.
ASUS ARES
The ASUS ARES gets its name from ancient Greek mythology. Ares is also known as Aries, the God of War. To be a bit more precise, Ares is the embodiment of bloodlust and slaughter. Ares presided over weaponry, the sieges, rebellion, and courage. For a video card, this is a perfect name, since most adult-focused games involve one brand of violence or another.
The ASUS ARES, then, is probably what most people wanted when AMD started talking about a dual-GPU video card as an upgrade path for the Radeon HD 5870. In terms of real-world performance, the Radeon HD 5970 has more in common with a pair of Radeon HD 5850 video cards than a pair of Radeon HD 5870s. The ASUS ARES is here to fix that little problem. It is, quite literally, a Radeon HD 5870 4GB CrossFireX solution on a single video card. What’s more, it also supports CrossFireX, for quad-GPU Radeon HD 5870 gaming. It is difficult to imagine that very many gamers will be able to afford even one of these $1200 video cards, to say nothing of a dual-video-card, Quad-GPU installation.
The GPUs on the ASUS ARES share technical specifications with the Radeon HD 5870. Each GPU has 1600 processor cores, 80 texture units, and 32 ROPs. The out-of-the-box clock speeds are 850MHz on the GPU, and 4.8GHz on the memory. Each GPU is capable of delivering 2.7 TeraFLOPs, combining to 5.4 TeraFLOPs for the whole video card. Each GPU has 2GB of GDDR5 memory for a total of 4GB of memory on-board.
The ARES’ packaging is truly impressive. It comes in a tremendous box. Inside that box is a large aluminum "007" briefcase complete with pushbutton latches and combination locks. Opening up the briefcase reveals the impressive ARES video card, as well as its various adapters, a Republic of Gamers case badge, and a Republic of Gamers mouse.
The ASUS ARES is huge. It is 5" tall and 11" long. It has a very large dual-slot cooling device which features eight 8mm heat-pipes and a single 100mm fan sporting ASUS’ "Republic of Gamers" logo. ASUS boasts that the fan provides 600% better airflow than AMD’s reference fan design. The cooling device itself is mostly covered with a red and black painted aluminum shell which is secured to the video card with eight small black machine screws, four on top, and four on bottom. Under the shell are two massive copper heat-sink and heat-pipe assemblies. Each GPU has its own heat-sink with four heat-pipes each. There is also a small copper heat-sink along the upper edge, between the GPUs. It does not appear to be covering DRAM modules, so it is probably serving to help cool the power regulation circuitry.
It is worth noting here that the heat-sink and fan is not a channeled design. That means that air is not forced through the vent on the PCI bracket after it blows across the heat-sink. Some of the air will doubtlessly escape that way, but it is not a forced exhaust, so gamers will need to ensure proper airflow before installing one of these video cards.
On the top edge of the video card, we find a single CrossFireX bridge connector, and three power connectors. Power-wise, this video card requires the use of two 8-pin auxiliary power connectors and one 6-pin connector. On the business end of the video card, we find one dual-link DVI connector, one HDMI connector, and one DisplayPort connector. Three of these ports can be used together for multi-display configurations, including Eyefinity. The back of the video card is completely covered with a large black aluminum heat-sink.
The ARES’ bundle is rather less impressive than we expected, but it is as complete as it absolutely has to be. Software-wise, it comes with a driver and utility CD for the video card and a driver CD for the included mouse. It also has a setup guide for the video card, and another for the mouse. On the hardware end of the bundle, there are two dual-6-pin auxiliary to single-8-pin auxiliary power adaptors, an HDMI to DVI adaptor, and a CrossFire bridge connector. Also included is a black aluminum Republic of Gamers case badge and a Republic of Gamers mouse.
The mouse looks and mostly feels like a solid piece of equipment, with the exception of the thumb buttons. They are both too wiggly and feel cheaply made. For this video card editor, the mouse was also altogether too light in weight (compared to the trusty G9), which made it feel harder to control. Some gamers may like the mouse, but this editor found it wanting. At any rate, it has all the right buttons and single-click DPI adjustment as well. It’s not junk, but it won’t replace the G9 any time soon.
Competition
This is a unique video card. It is also an extraordinarily expensive video card. There is simply nothing else in the same pricing league with which to make performance comparisons. The closest we can come is a pair of NVIDIA GeForce GTX 480s configured in SLI. Even still, that is $300 less than the ASUS ARES. So, for the sake of competition, we have included a few other multi-GPU configurations in this evaluation. First is the GeForce GTX 480 SLI rig. Then, we have a pair each of Radeon HD 5870 1GB and 2GB video cards, configured to run in CrossFireX for multi-GPU performance scaling. Finally, we have a single Radeon HD 5970, because we want to see how the increased memory footprint and clock speeds improve performance for the ASUS ARES.