ASUS ARES

The ARES, which is part of Asus’ Republic of Gamers series, feels special right off the bat because it ships in a massive box that when unpacked, reveals a heavy-duty metal briefcase. Within this you’ll find the ARES graphics card and like its packaging, the graphics card feels substantial as well.

While the card’s length might make you raise an eyebrow, it’s the weight of the card’s cooling system that will truly shock you. Asus has built a seemingly bulletproof cooler that employs a massive cooling fan and Copper heatsinks with eight 8mm heatpipes. While we had no problems mounting and securing this behemoth to our test rig the cooling system, despite its massive proportions, proved very loud after 15 minutes of testing.

Running our benchmarks on the ARES we were blown away by its performance results. The ARES managed benchmark results of 134fps, 79fps and 61.3fps at 1920 x 1200 pixels in our H.A.W.X, World in Conflict and Heaven v2.0 benchmarks. These are the highest results we’ve ever received from a single graphics card.

The card’s amazing numbers come courtesy of two ATI Radeon HD 5870 GPUs each running at 850MHz and 4GB of high speed GDDR5 memory running at 4800MHz.