Asus Ares II - Overclocking

Although Asus has gone to lengths to overclock what is essentially a pair of already overclocked GPUs, the impressive roster of power circuitry and closed loop water-cooling solution left us with the distinct feeling that the Ares II still had more to give. Asus clearly thinks so too, as it supplies a copy of its own GPU Tweak overclocking and monitoring software alongside its custom drivers, so we fired it up to see what the Ares II could really do.

With a single Ares II in our rig, we were eventually able to reach a stable core overclock of 1,240MHz, a 13 per cent boost over the speeds Asus sets the card at, and 115MHz faster than the top speed reacher by the Club3D HD 7990 6GB. On the memory, we pushed the card by another 4.5 per cent to 1.725GHz (6.9GHz effective). This speeds were achieved with a 120 per cent power draw setting and using a core voltage of 1,344mV. No meaningful overclocks could be achieved with a CrossFire setup. We used the Battlefield 3 5,760 x 1,080 test and the Unigine benchmark to test the impact of the overclock.



Read our performance analysis on the next page.