The ASUS Republic of Gamers ARES card first came out back when the AMD graphics cards were in their HD 5000 series. Utilising a pair of HD 5870s, the fastest single GPU AMD had on offer, this card was the créme de la créme of the AMD lineup, beating the monstrous HD 5970 but with an extortionate price. Now ASUS has decided to mix things up a bit, by falling back onto the HD 7870 GPU instead of the HD 7970 or HD 7950 ASUS is able to make this card more affordable and consume less power.
The use of dual HD 7870s would give this card 4GB of GDDR5 memory, 2560 stream processors, 160 TMUs, 64 ROPs and a 512 bit memory interface (2 X 256bit). Power consumption is rumoured to be in the 300W region meaning two 8 pins. The all important price tag is somewhere in the region of $800/£600 making it about $100 more expensive than HD 7870 SLI and $400 cheaper than the original ARES which was a staggering $1200. Performance wise this is how VideoCardz.com predicts the ARES 2 will fare:
HD 7970 65%
GTX 670 73%
GTX 680 77%
HD 7870 CrossFire 100%
GTX 690 113%
Source: VideoCardz
