When buying a graphics card, you aren’t exactly expecting a box that a smaller wide monitor could fit in, are you? ASUS begs to disagree, making the very first contact with ARES unique. The first thing that you’ll be taking out of the enormous box will be a suitcase! Yes, a suitcase, but not an ordinary plastic one, but a genuine metal suitcase with a protection system consisting of a double three-digit code. Anyone would think that it’s more likely to find some sort of weapon contained inside than a graphics card (although a card weighing over 2 kg could very well serve as a cold weapon). Besides the card itself, which we’ll talk about later, this suitcase contains a driver disc, the accompanying documentation and the necessary cables and adapters. A surprising addition to this is a rather solid gaming mouse, perhaps not as classy as G9x or the best Razers, but certainly high-quality and very usable. We couldn’t dig up any additional info on it, although it’s very likely that it’s as limited as the graphics card, being exclusive to ARES and not available in retail anywhere, at least not in this incarnation.

Why give ARES a name like this? To point to the fact that the new model from ASUS is exactly that, a doubled HD 5870. As a reminder, the referent HD 5970 has two Cypress chips identical to those found in Radeons HD 5870. However, the clocks that these chips are working at are identical to those found in HD 5850 models. The reason for this is cooling system limitations, which make it compulsory for the clocks to be decreased by 125 MHz in order to ensure stability in all conditions. ARES, with its top-notch cooling system, doesn’t have that problem, which means that the chips are actually clocked at the referent HD 5870 values, bringing two HD 5870 chips properly on a single card for the first time.

ASUS’ ARES looks stunningly similar to GeForce 7800GT Dual at first glance, which is probably even remembered by few of you, being presented at the end of 2005. This was a model from a very limited graphics card series, only 1000 copies of which were made, but the interesting thing is that all prestigious series cards since have been numerated, which isn’t the case with ARES. It remains unknown how limited this model exactly is, and the people at ASUS couldn’t disclose this information either. The moment you grab ARES, you’ll realise why it costs as much. There really was no compromise. The card is dominated by the huge copper cooling system, weighing about two kilograms. The cooling profile is made in two chunks, and the most high-quality copper was used; according to ASUS, 99% oxygen-free. This production process definitely had its impact on the price, but heat transfer benefits are enormous. Each of the body parts is striped with four heatpipes, which additionally contribute to temperature distribution. The active cooling bits consist of a high airflow fan. To be honest, high airflow also meant high noise levels, which almost touched the unbearable limit. Owners of good soundproof enclosures will probably have no reason to worry, though.

However, if you’re the type of enthusiast who keeps the computer at the middle of the desk and outside of the case, you’re probably going to have to meddle in manual fan control settings. We’d prefer a turbine-type fan on this card, one that would blow the hot air out of the enclosure. Beneath the cooler, you’ll find a black PCB, hiding Volterra VT1165 voltage regulators, which was a clear indication that we’ll be able to manually set voltages using ASUS’ SmartDoctor software. Besides the already stated, another proof of a top-tier overclocker’s graphics card is measuring points, set at visible places, so that you can effortlessly check anything that you’ve changed in the software manually with a multimeter. ARES has two 8-pin and one 6-pin molex voltage connector, which can theoretically deliver up to 450 W of additional power - more than enough for any overclock. As far as pairing options are concerned, there is a single CrossFireX connector present, which means two ARES cards or four GPUs in one PC. The only problem is that this combo is only working on Intel X58 motherboards as of yet. Two ARES cards in CrossFireX were impossible to achieve on our AMD 785 and Intel P55 motherboards.