Legit Reviews

ASUS ARES II Video Card Review

If you are looking for a new gaming graphics card and money is not an issue, you are in for a real treat today! ASUS recently sent over the ASUS ARES II and we have been pounding on this card for days on end. Read on to see how two AMD Radeon HD 7970 GPUs perform when overclocked to 1100MHz on our test system!



The ASUS ARES II is an example of what can be developed when given enough time and money. ASUS has done an amazing job of building a card that shows the full potential of the AMD Radeon HD 7970 'Tahiti XT2' GPU. In fact we can safely say that no other company will build a Radeon HD 7000 series card that is close to this. It is clear that ASUS is one of the few companies left in the PC hardware business that has the budget and mindset to just flat out go for it when it comes to high-end flagship products. It takes deep pockets and dedication, seven months in this situation, to bring a product like the ASUS ARES II to fruition...

Article Title: ASUS ARES II Video Card Review
Article URL: http://www.legitreviews.com/article/2133/1/

I don't get it. ASUS made 999 of these cards. They were sent out to review sites around the globe in tons of languages. I saw some reviews were they were sent 2-3 to test Crossfire. So at the end of the day they have maybe 50 to sell. What's the point? To get us talking about the ASUS brand? To show the other brands that they could do it? To show AMD that they didn't need them to create a reference?

Major_A wrote:I don't get it. ASUS made 999 of these cards. They were sent out to review sites around the globe in tons of languages. I saw some reviews were they were sent 2-3 to test Crossfire. So at the end of the day they have maybe 50 to sell. What's the point? To get us talking about the ASUS brand? To show the other brands that they could do it? To show AMD that they didn't need them to create a reference?

Yep. Pretty much so, that's why it's a conversation piece to get the benchers going

Well, my card is a loaner... Sadly, every review I've done this year with the exception of one has been loaner items.

ASUS sent out under 50 cards worldwide, so well over 900 cards are going into the channel. Some overclockers get everything for free which ruins all the overclocking competitions if you ask me, but that has been going on since before I started Legit Reviews in 2002. I started the site after seeing all the stupid stuff going on and I can honestly say that it's not nearly as bad as it once was, but the top overclockers get super hand picked cherry items.

I updated the article...

There are now LuxMark v2.0 benchmark results included.

I also updated the driver to Catalyst 13.2 Beta 5 and re-did the FarCry 3 benchmarks that I did with FRAPS.

At 2560x1600 I noticed a nice performance jump:

Catalyst 13.2 Beta 4 - 41.3 FPS
Catalyst 13.2 Beta 5 - 45.2 FPS

That said the AMD card has more micro stutters than the NVIDIA card. It's just not as smooth despite having a 24% average frame rate.

LuxMark has heavily favored AMD's architecture. Any specific reasons why?

Major_A wrote:LuxMark has heavily favored AMD's architecture. Any specific reasons why?

Radeon GPUs have more "cores" which benefit applications that leverage lots of simple calculations.

Gotcha, thanks.

Major_A wrote:LuxMark has heavily favored AMD's architecture. Any specific reasons why?

I figured I'd ask AMD to answer this as my answer would just be an educated guess. I sent them your question on Feb 7th and just heard back! Here you go:

I think Luxmark favors any architecture that is strong in compute…Luxmark is a compute benchmark. Graphics Core Next is incredibly strong not just on traditional 3D workloads, but on compute as well. Sadly for NVIDIA, their latest Kepler architecture is not strong in compute at all.

If you look at DiRT: Showdown for example, it’s kind of a shape of things to come. Compute is very heavily utilized in that title in conjunction with its revolutionary Forward+ rendering engine, and it’s going to be utilized even more in the next little while in future game engines.

AMD has pretty much summed it up, GCN is unbeatable when it comes to compute races and results show

Thanks for taking the time to ask. Now if only more companies would learn to code this resource into their apps.