Asus decided that CES 2013 is a perfect time to launch a new graphics card in its Republic of Gamers line of products, the ROG Ares II. Based on two HD 7970 GHz Edition GPUs and paired up with a dual water+air cooling, the Ares II features an impressive design and will certainly justify the premium ROG moniker.
Similar to the Ares I, which was based on two HD 5870 GPUs and the Nvidia equipped Mars (like the Mars II with two GTX 580 GPUs), the Ares II also features two factory overclocked HD 7970 GHz Edition GPUs for a total of 4096 stream processors (2048 per GPU). The new Ares II graphics card is pretty much what we have already seen from Powercolor and their Devil13 card, but with twist in the cooling department.
The new Ares II ended up working at 1050MHz for the GPU and 6.6GHz for 6GB (3GB per GPU) of GDDR5 memory. It requires three 8-pin PCI-Express power connectors and with 75W from the PCI-Express slot the total maximum power ends up at 525W. Asus opted for a 20-phase VRM that deals with the GPU and memory.
The cooling system on the new Ares II is something that we have not seen so far as it combines a closed-loop water cooling system with 120mm radiator and two push-pull fans with a standard 80mm air cooling on the card itself. Judging by the looks of it, the cooler on the graphics card will probably deal with the VRM and memory, while the water cooler will handle the GPUs.
As it was the case with previous Asus ROG graphics cards, the Ares II will also be a limited edition product with a total of 1,000 cards. The price or the actual release date have not been announced but it will not be cheap, that is sure.
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