Gadgetory

hello there everyone and welcome back once again to Paul's hardware this is my video on the asus Ares 2 which I don't have here I had one here I ran a bunch of benchmarks on it and then I had to bring it back and return it but I do have some stock footage for some some pictures I took of it what was here so I will be sharing those with you and at the same time for those of you who might not be familiar with what the Asus area is to actually is apart from the couple videos already have on our new mega TV YouTube channel I did want to share at least some of the specs to familiarize you guys with it this is a dual GPU card so it uses two AMD Radeon HD 7970 gigahertz Edition GPUs both on the same board everything is entirely custom designed by Asus they did a ton of work with this card it has a custom water-cooled design so you get a closed-loop water cooler attached to the card with 120-millimeter radiator here's a quick exploded view as well so you can kind of see a little bit more with the construction again full videos on this over on the new ITV channel so not gonna take up too much time right here but I did want to talk a little bit about the card for one thing as well as kind of reply to some of the questions and comments that I got on some of our new atv videos because some of them were we're pretty interesting and at least wanted to provide a reply and some of my own personal thoughts and opinions on this card the first and biggest point that people brought up was the cost because it cost $1500 it's a limited edition card they only made a thousand of them and pretty much it's already sold out so they're gonna be really hard to get right now so from a collector's edition kind of standpoint I mean you can you might see some value in that as far as it being worth more money a lot of people were saying well why don't I just go ahead and buy 379 70s you can do that in fact I might just be sharing some 79-73 way across Forex benchmarks but I'll get to that in a minute and you could do that so I guess the question here be do I see the value in this card and I actually as I was testing it decided yes I kinda - I've never gone out and bought a card of this caliber myself personally I'm lucky enough to have gotten to try one and test one but when you take into account that you have custom picked 7970 GPUs that are pre overclocked and that you can overclock even more when you take into account that it's got the custom closed-loop water cooler on it because if you were going to water cool your video cards especially with a custom loop that's going to take some work and some additional money to buy all the different hardware that's needed for that so that's another thing so I kind of do see the value in it now again you could get more performance for the same amount of money by going triple cross triple crossfire X or 3-way SLI or something like that but for people who don't want to go all out like that for people who don't want the cards to run super hot because they did all of this within a 600 watt thermal envelope and the highest the highest temperature I saw on the GPUs on any of my tests 64 degrees Celsius and that's what the card being overclocked the 12:25 on the GPU and gosh should I forget right now but I think something like 8000 on the memory which which is pretty good overclock and I did that without too much tweaking and too much work so I think anybody would be able to hit that with this card so that's that I think there's two main reasons why Asus goes down this road and makes these types of cards because they've done it before with the Mars with the area series hopefully they'll continue to do it in the future and a couple different reasons I think one is for publicity because let's face it if you have the fastest video card that's out there people are going to talk about it I'm talking about it you guys are listen to me talk about it the second reason I think is because they're actually getting some R&D with it Asus I do not believe and this is my personal speculation but I do not think Asus makes money on these cards even though they're very expensive the amount of time and effort that goes into designing them is not equal to the number of them that they sell because they it's a limited edition they're only making a thousand of them whether you're talking about the PCB layout whether you're talking about closed-loop water water cooling on a video card we've seen that before ZOTAC had a water-cooled GTX 580 that I got to try out but the way Asus did it and the way they implemented it with a dual GPU card I think was just pretty smart and turned out to be a really good product so that's kind of my stance on the card look at it this way if a year or two down the line you start seeing like the kind of more basic high-end cards of the four to five hundred dollar cards selling what the closed-loop water cooling option wouldn't that be nice wouldn't you kind of go for that because the cards stay cooler you can overclock them more and I like the closed-loop water coolers because you can take the rad you can bolt it on anywhere it's really secure anyway so let's go and do let's at the benchmarks benchmarks yes now what I did here because another big question on the videos was benchmarking and how I was comparing the cards and people are saying how could you take the areas to and compare it to a gtx 680 stock gtx 680 by itself that's not fair and and really guys I wasn't trying to say look at these two cards will the 680 beat the Aries - that's not my point my point is that if I show you the Aries to score in 3d mark 11 and I don't even know what the score is off the top of my head but here's the score if you have anything to compare that so you can't say well relative to what so the 680 was there more to say well here's a 680 here's kind of the performance gap between them which I hope is still valuable for you guys but this video this video is more about a benchmark battle so what I did by popular demand was I took my areas to benchmarks took my hair used to overclocked benchmarks running on this test but over here which is a 39 60 X on the overclocked benchmarks overclocked to the 4.5 gigahertz basic benchmarks running at stock speeds and set it all up on that and I tested it yes against six 80s in SLI to give you guys a more fair performance hailed championship challenge between these cards and a bit more like head-to-head combat now bear in mind - 680 is not going to cost as much as the Ares 2 and then I think with that we're about ready to go but oh actually here's here's another question from our fans okay a couple other things I forgot the GTX 690 hmm I should put the areas due against the GTX 690 but I don't have one I got one so briefly before the 690 launched I got to match market then those were pre launched drivers from like literally I think almost a year ago so um without one to retest right now with current drivers on the current testbed with updated everything I don't feel right comparing those to each other same thing with the double 1379 90 by power color again I don't have one right now to test on this testbed in particular and I don't have one to test with updated been with updated drivers because that does affect the outcome anyway oh I see another suggestion here how about the 79th sight and said how about these 79 70s in in crossfire x2 way that is a good question alright figure out ofin I will also be throwing in the H is ice qx2 version of the Radeon HD 7970 gigahertz Edition again this is a factory overclocked version of the 7970 the GPU frequency on this one is going to be running at 1050 so I got two of these in two-way crossfire X they got custom coolers so that should give a little bit better performance comparison because these are 7970 gigahertz additions against the 7970 gigahertz additions in the areas to house that that work for you guys no I see it doesn't ok gtx 680 stock is like why would you even bother doing that testing the stock gtx 680 when there's so many like custom awesome gtx 680 s that are out there you can test it against well it might mean another four or five hours of benchmarking guys but i'm gonna do that for you right now okay so i have will now be also including along with the gtx 680 reference design sli benchmarks 2-way SLI i'll also be including two-way SLI benchmarks with this guy right here this is the galaxy gtx 680 GC overclocked custom-designed white edition PCB GTX 680 so I'll also be doing this guy into a SLI and hopefully that should satisfy all the requested comparisons wait one last question what would it take to beat the Aries - a very good question now I would show you guys some 3-way benchmarks but I do have some three they have benchmarks actually I have 3-way benchmarks which with the H is Radeon HD 7970 gigahertz edition xqx - I'm kind of curious the Ares - overclocked against 3-way crossfire X bear in mind guys my through my crossfire X numbers not on the same test bench these were on a gigabyte C 77 X u p7 motherboard so that's a z77 chipset that's a 3770k processor the gigabyte motherboard has a multiplexing chip so it actually is really good for three and four way across 4x or SLI benchmarks everything else is on the same test bed with the three 960 X I am just benched no more time for benchmarking so here you go guys my benchmark battle with the Ares 2 all right there you go that was a lot of work condense down into 20 or 30 seconds benchmark footage but hopefully those charts and graphs are gonna give you guys a better idea of who won what benchmark so just to sort of give my summation of what we just looked at the areas to performed really well it was able to actually beat even like standard CrossFireX 7970 gigahertz additions and some of the tests and actually when overclocked beat in just about all the tests so overclocking it's fantastic but of course the 3-way crossfire X configuration did come out on top so if you're gonna be in areas - you got to go with a three GPU configuration or you gotta overclock the crap out of your existing 79 70s and as you guys many people that sell I spent a lot of time on the benchmarks for this video and unfortunately that's one last thing that I could have done I could overclock the 79 70s here but I ran out of time I'll see if I have a chance to do that in the future but I'm not gonna make any promises that's gonna wrap it up for this video guys again now this has been my benchmark battle but the issues area is - as well as a collection of the video cards that you guys can see in front of me thank you very much for watching if you enjoy the benchmark battle types of videos please toss a like my way be sure to subscribe if you want to see more thanks everyone we'll see you all next time you