When over the top power isn't enough, you can rely on a limited edition video card from ASUS to bring the fun.
ATI was first out of the gates with a DirectX11-capable core. They were also the first to design a card that featured two of those cores on a single PCB; the venerable HD5970, notable for still topping the single-card performance stack. As powerful as the 5970 was (and still is), a bunch of manufacturers decided to take it a step further and increase the clockspeed of those cores even higher. ASUS was within that bunch, and like that overeager banana that ripens three days before the rest, they've pulled out all the stops with their own flavour of the 5970. Which brings us...
Ares: Greek war godWhen ASUS engineers sit down at the drawing board and are told to design a ridiculous top-end card, they are quite honestly given free reign. We've seen it before with the Mars, a dual GTX285 monster, and they've done it again with the Ares - essentially a dual HD5870. Each core runs at factory speed of 850MHz, encapsulating 1600 shader units that combine for a total of 3200. Accompanying these are two 256-bit memory buses, which remain exclusively attached to a single core core, and each has access to 2048MB of speedy GDDR5 memory chips.
Power requirements for such a card are similar to the Sapphire 5970 Toxic from last Issue; but in this case have been expanded to offer dual 8-pin PCIe power connectors [i]and an extra 6-pin connector![/i] Electrically the card connects via a full-length PCIe 2.0 slot, giving each core an 8-laneway pipe to the rest of the system which should be plenty for its workloads. There's the standard three outputs on-hand - DVI, HDMI and DisplayPort - and there's laughably a single CrossFire connector at the top of the card. We imagine this is there for amusement's sake, as the Ares is going to be a limited run, though the card can technically be run in Crossfire with a 5870 or 5850. Why any rich moneybags would want to is another matter entirely.
See how it shines...Engineers finished the card and eventually got around to mentioning it to the marketing department, who did their research on Ares' past and found that his armour was an important part of the Greek mythology - so they threw the blueprints back at the engineers and said 'All that bronze stuff? Yeah, like, do something close to that.' Or so we imagine.
However that little conversation happened, the end result is clearly in imitation of Ares' blazing bronze body armour, and it's quite impressive in person. Constructed within an excessively large form factor, the Ares bursts through the height restrictions generally placed on expansion cards; and similarly pushes outwards to fill out three expansion slots, while remaining lengthy.
Built up in layers from the silicon PCB that plays host to the cores, memory chips and power systems, the first layer consists of a shaped aluminium plate that clamps on to each side of the card. Covering every major component bar cores, this plate has thermal pads between it and the card to avoid electrical shorts and to aid heat transmission. The second layer involves two large copper heatsinks: quite literally a shaped block of copper, with four 8mm copper heatpipes embedded within. These are separate and cool each core individually. Copper isn't quite bronze, but it so turns out that bronze makes a terrible material for cooling things due to its low thermal conductivity.
Who knew?
Issue: 137 | June, 2012