The Republic of Gamers, more gaming fanatic than communist enclave, the ROG team are in-fact a group of hard core gamers let loose in the ASUS labs. Developing hardware with the sole purpose of improving your gaming experience, gaining a legitimate advantage is secondary of course. Now the ROG team have released the latest entrant in the Uber Video card category, the ARES II.

The Ares II represents no compromise hardware, with a limited production run of 1,000 cards the Ares will be an exclusive card. Not helping the situation ASUS will price the ARES II at $1,500 USD.

This water cooled monster video card (over 30cm long) is based around a pair of AMD 7970 GHz edition GPU’s coupled with 6GB of Uber fast memory and all built onto a single PCB.

Each of the 7970GHz edition GPU’s is individually overclockable, the maximum clock speed is not set in stone here, it is more of a suggestion, an adventure in nerve. Officially the clock speed out of the box will be set to 1050Ghz base with 1100GHz available in boost mode, up from the original 7970’s 924GHz. The GDDR5 memory is clocked at 6600GHz. How far are you willing to push the numbers? We will have to wait for hardware availability to find out how high it will go.

Although a smoking $1,500 video card isn’t a sight anyone wants to see there is very little chance of this happening, temperature sensors and the use of 20 phase Super Alloy Power caps should ensure the cards longevity even under heave use / abuse..

If you need to ask how much power the Ares II requires then you probably won’t have enough, an 850 watt power supply with 3 8pin power connectors is recommended. Realistically though once you add an Extreme Edition CPU, 32GB of Uber DDR Ram, SSD and Hard drives the power requirements quickly pass 1000 watts.

Around the back of the card there is nothing but ports, no vents is another advantage of water cooling. With 2 DVI-D and 4 full sized DisplayPort connectors the ARES II will happily drive 6 full HD (1920×1080) displays at full speed, a trick called Eyefinity by AMD.

Here at Highpants we love sealed water cooling units such as the one used on the ARES 2. In this case 2 12cm fans are driving air through the radiator, a powerful combination. The water cooler should also help keep fan noise to a minimum, if it’s done right. When running at full throttle the Ares II will generate over 400watts of heat, ASUS are reporting that it manages to keep the card running at 51 degrees Celcius which is impressively chilly.

For those that must have the best, when frames per seconds are essential the Republic of Gamers give us the ARES II, the new King of Uber video cards.

Reference: ASUS ROG ARES II