Games By Matthew Humphries Sep. 8, 2014 12:45 pm
As graphics cards have become ever more powerful we’ve seen them move to a form factor that takes up the space of two slots on your motherboard. It’s required to fit in the necessary cooling for all that processing power. However, Asus is bucking the trend and has managed to produce a single-slot dual-GPU card thanks to the use of a water block as standard.
The Asus ROG Ares III graphics card comprises of two 1030MHz Radeon Hawaii XT R9 290X GPUs complemented by 8GB of GDDR5 memory (4GB per GPU) clocked at 5GHz. That’s a combination Asus claims will easily outperform (15% faster) a Nvidia GTX Titan Z. If you’re playing Battlefield 4 at 4K resolution, expect framerates to be 33% higher than the Titan Z, too.
But it’s not just the performance that’s impressive, it’s the footprint. You are getting a card that has no fans and only takes up one slot, meaning it’s going to fit in a much more compact case. That’s made possible by a custom water block sitting on the card attached to a radiator for heat dissipation. Asus also doesn’t mind you overclocking the card, and they even include a GPU Tweak utility.
With the good news out of the way, here’s the bad news: Asus is only producing an initial run of 500 cards this month. Pricing hasn’t been divulged yet, but you can imagine it’s going to be high. Even so, if Asus can do it and offer this level of performance, so can others and hopefully they will. Retaining performance while removing bulk and noise is always going to be welcomed even if it does come at a premium price.
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The Asus ROG Ares III graphics card comprises of two 1030MHz Radeon Hawaii XT R9 290X GPUs complemented by 8GB of GDDR5 memory (4GB per GPU) clocked at 5GHz. That’s a combination Asus claims will easily outperform (15% faster) a Nvidia GTX Titan Z. If you’re playing Battlefield 4 at 4K resolution, expect framerates to be 33% higher than the Titan Z, too.
But it’s not just the performance that’s impressive, it’s the footprint. You are getting a card that has no fans and only takes up one slot, meaning it’s going to fit in a much more compact case. That’s made possible by a custom water block sitting on the card attached to a radiator for heat dissipation. Asus also doesn’t mind you overclocking the card, and they even include a GPU Tweak utility.
With the good news out of the way, here’s the bad news: Asus is only producing an initial run of 500 cards this month. Pricing hasn’t been divulged yet, but you can imagine it’s going to be high. Even so, if Asus can do it and offer this level of performance, so can others and hopefully they will. Retaining performance while removing bulk and noise is always going to be welcomed even if it does come at a premium price.
More...
