I was fortunate enough to get to CeBIT this year, and on the first day I shot over to ASUS to check out the upcoming ASUS HD5970 ARES. As you may well know this is the successor to the MARS card that surfaced last year. Only 1000pcs were made, but they all sold in a very short amount of time which suprised many critics. Their gripe was the RRP and the amount of power that is needed to run the card. Just over a hundred units were shipped to the UK and all sold in a short space of time.

The ASUS HD5970 ARES is easily the most powerful card we have yet seen in existence. Not only does it boast a whopping 4GB GDDR5, it has a rather large GPU clock speed of 850MHz. One of the first things you may notice are the requirement for 3 power cables - two 8-pin and one 6-pin. Surely, very power hungry indeed.

It was clearly one of the biggest attractions at one of many ASUS booths and it was quite hard to get decent shots of the card due to the fingerprints and perspex cover. The card was also security tagged as you would appreciate, its very high in value. (Estimated at around the £1000 mark, similar to that of the MARS.) So I got my good friend Iain and another ASUS collegue to remove the cover for some *exclusive* 'up close and personal shots'. You probably won't find clearer shots on the web, most are all from outside of the case... so Enjoy!!

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Full of fingerprints, and not very good quality at all


ASUS guys remove the case for me


3 cables required for power, this thing is power hungry!!


The massive cooling cover encasing the GPUs