First Look: Asus Rampage III Gene, Quad SLI, Ares HD 5970

Asus Ares Radeon HD 5970

We were also treated to an update on the Ares card first seen back at CeBIT back in March. For anyone who missed our CeBIT coverage, the Ares is the successor to the mentally quick but driver hobbled Asus Mars card.

Unlike the Mars though, which used dual Nvidia chips, the Ares is based on a pair of ATI GPUs with two full fat 850MHz ATI Radeon HD 5870 chips located under the huge copper heatsinks and aggressively styled shroud.


This theoretically puts the Ares ahead of a stock ATI Radeon HD 5970 which uses a pair of underclocked HD 5870 cores, but the Ares lags behind the 900MHz speeds we have seen in other hyper top end cards such as the Sapphire 5970 Toxic. The card sports a hefty 4096MB of GDDR5 clocked at 4.8GHz though this is again behind the 5GHz of Sapphire's latest and greatest card.


Despite this Asus claims an impressive 25% speed increase over a stock HD 5970 in 3D Mark Vantage so it’ll be interesting to see how the card stacks up in a more real world situation. Asus also claims to have worked hard on the cooler with two huge blocks of copper sitting on top of the dual GPUs to attempt to stop the card going supernova.

These blocks are cooled by an allegedly quiet fan (though again we’ll wait and see) which Asus claims shifts 600 per cent more air than the ATI cooler it replaces. We are however unsure why Asus have gone to such great lengths to make a unique cooler, given than the kind of people likely to buy a card of this sort are also likely to be looking at watercooling it.


If you think this kind of aggressively styled hyper card tomfoolery is for you then we’d recommend you start looking in to ways of flogging a kidney or your first born given the exuberant estimated price tag of around £1,000. Having said this the card is on a limited edition run, much like the Mars before it, so getting your hands on one may not be as easy as heading to your favored online retailer.

ASUS wouldn’t let on an exact release date but we are expecting review samples into the labs in the next few weeks so watch this space to see if Asus can regain the performance crown from Sapphire.