ASUS ARES HD 5970 4GB Review - PAGE 5

Wow, what a beast! 1200$ is a lot of coin though. How does one of these compare with 2 5870's in crossfire?
Interesting to see how one would compare to 2 separate 5970's in crossfire too.

Still nice review and wow that card is huge.
At least for 1200$ you don't just get a flimsy box.

i guess im going to be the grouch and say that im surprised that for such a damn high cost, there is not much that is included with the card. no adapters for the different display ports? come on. also, im surprised that they have a VGA port instead of a DVI or another HDMI port. who would get this, and still run a monitor with a VGA port?

grav, regarding the comparison between this and two 5870s, i think they might have similar performance, but either way, id still get that over this 5970 any day. hell, id get a third 5870 too. apparently they scale well.

quote hiigaran

i guess im going to be the grouch and say that im surprised that for such a damn high cost, there is not much that is included with the card. no adapters for the different display ports? come on. also, im surprised that they have a VGA port instead of a DVI or another HDMI port. who would get this, and still run a monitor with a VGA port?

I agree it could have come with more goodies, but the gaming mouse was a nice touch.

Also, it doesn't have a VGA port. It has an HDMI,DisplayPort and DVI-D port. The picture did have a blue cover over the DVI-D port though.

ahh, right. in the picture it looked like a VGA port to me for some reason.

Is the 4GB of memory really all that necessary?

I imagine it's mainly for outputting to 2 (can it handle more?) video outputs at high resolution each?

quote tallteen86

Is the 4GB of memory really all that necessary?

I imagine it's mainly for outputting to 2 (can it handle more?) video outputs at high resolution each?

All ATI 5000 series cards can output 3 displays, with the exception of the 6 and 12 display special eyefinity cards.



If anybody has this card, I'm sure they have 3 high res monitors.

quote

If anybody has this card, I'm sure they have 3 high res monitors.

^this. that extra memory would really help in minimising the performance loss from using a higher resolution when running two or three high res monitors.

Interesting second card in this series.

I have to wonder if they're splitting the names between the brands;

ATI = Greek
NVIDIA = Roman

Would make since, seeing as how the ARES is an HD 5970, while the MARS was a GTX 295.

But hey, don't forget that these R.O.G. brand cards have a second purpose; they also serve as space heaters.

Excellent review and very infrmative. I agree that the price is a little insane, but if you want that kind of bragging rights, lol you gotta pay!

By the way, I may be wrong, but isn't the 5970 simply two 5870's in one card, making the Ares, in effect, 4 5870's in the card with, reflective of the 4GB's of video ram?

quote ChiroVette

Excellent review and very infrmative. I agree that the price is a little insane, but if you want that kind of bragging rights, lol you gotta pay!

By the way, I may be wrong, but isn't the 5970 simply two 5870's in one card, making the Ares, in effect, 4 5870's in the card with, reflective of the 4GB's of video ram?

Thanks!

No it is still just 2 HD 5870's combined. The on-board memory and clock speeds are increased though, which will yield better performance.

Can you run 3 monitors at once on this card? I've heard of other cards with similar outputs only able to output on 2 out of 3 video outputs at a time.

That is an insane video card though.

quote

Can you run 3 monitors at once on this card? I've heard of other cards with similar outputs only able to output on 2 out of 3 video outputs at a time.

for 1200 big ones, i would expect it to.

Yes, it can run three monitors. But, it has three different connection types so all the monitors will use a different source. For $1200 it would have been nice to see some adapters with the card, but ASUS is marketing the ARES more as the fastest graphics cards available rather than pushing the Eyefinity technology.

Brings a new meaning to "Plug and Play". Just plug this card in, and play any game out on the market.