Asus releases Ares II with dual Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition

Asus has on several occasions been able to boast of having the world’s fastest graphics card. This with Mars and Mars II which in practice were dual Geforce GTX 280 and GTX 580 respectively on a graphics card, as well as the company’s Ares with dual Radeon HD 5870. Now Asus announces its new Ares II at CES which follows in the same footsteps, this time with dual Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition.

The Asus ROG Ares II comes equipped with two “Tahiti XT” graphics circuits and thus comes with 2 x 2,048 stream processors and a total of six gigabytes of GDDR5 memory – three gigabytes for each graphics circuit. The clock frequency is 1,050 MHz (1,100 MHz Boost) and 6,600 MHz efficiently on the GDDR5 memory, 50 MHz (50 MHz Boost) and 600 MHz respectively over the standard frequency in HD 7970 GHz Edition.

To power the graphics card, there are three 8-pin PCI Express that with the PCI Express slot can deliver 525 watts to its components. The graphics card comes with a current design of 20 phases and the company’s digital voltage regulation Asus Digi + VRM will contribute to increased stability and overclocking margins.

The cooling for the seemingly powerful graphics card comes equipped with a sealed water cooler equipped with double 120 millimeter fans. In this way, the design takes up only two expansion slots, unlike the three that are common with this type of graphics card.

The water cooling is complemented by a centered fan of 80 millimeters, which is most likely dedicated to cooling memory circuits and VRM. Asus says that cooling should keep the graphics card’s temperatures 31 degrees lower than the reference design for the Nvidia Geforce GTX 690.

The new graphics card will, just like the previous Ares / Mars graphics card, be produced in a limited edition of 1,000 copies. At the time of writing, there is no price information for Asus ROG Ares II – expect that the graphics card will cost well over SEK 10,000.