ASUS ROG ARES 2 Dual Radeon HD 7870 Graphics Card Incoming
Back in 2010, ASUS released their first Republic of Gamers (ROG) ARES graphics card featuring dual Radeon HD 5870 GPUs (pictured above). Unlike the Radeon HD 5970 of the time which had the core and memory speeds downclocked from the HD 5870 reference speeds of 850/1,200 MHz to 720/1,000 MHz respectively, the ASUS ROG ARES ran at full speed – essentially a Radeon HD 5870 X2. This gave the card a considerable edge over the HD 5970, with a texture fillrate of 136 GTexels/s (up from the HD 5970’s 116 GTexels/s) and memory bandwidth of 307.2 GB/s (up from the HD 5970’s 256.0 GB/s).
Fast-forward to today, and the ASUS ROG ARES 2 has been spotted. Unlike the ARES before it, the ARES 2 is not based off of two high end GPUs but instead two “Pitcairn” Radeon HD 7870s. It is likely that the GPUs will be clocked to speeds higher than those of the HD 7870 GHz Edition, although official clock speeds have not been announced. A total of 4 GB of GDDR5 memory will be available, split evenly between the two GPUs and accessed across two 256-bit buses, although once again the speed is not yet known.
One possible reason for the ARES 2 using less-than-top-end GPUs is to aim the card at the (currently empty) US $650-750 range, as the card should be faster than any single-GPU card out at the moment while being considerably cheaper than the dual-GPU GeForce GTX 690 or upcoming Radeon HD 7990.
The ARES 2 will require two 8-pin PCIe power connectors and should have a TDP of around 300w, but idle power consumption should be low thanks to AMD’s ZeroCore Crossfire which will power down the second GPU whenever it is not needed. Even though a single Pitcairn GPU is not very hot, keeping the temperature of two of them under control at overclocked speeds will require a tri-slot cooler. Source — VideoCardz.com
