So, you have a desire for some... bling? No, you don't have to go round the back of the Flaming Noob Inn and ask a man named Nick "raZor" Rock for "a little something to take the edge off". Instead, all you have to do is visit ASUS, and you'll get something even better!nVidia is still holding out against the competition with its Fermi GPGPU, but ATI is nonetheless set to impress. The Asus Ares is the dual-GPU version of the AMD 5870, but is differentiated by way of 4GB RAM, as opposed to the regular 2GB. It doesn't increase 3D performance by a great deal; instead the main benefit here is the number of displays it can output to, and the resolution it's capable of doing this at, namely 3x 2560x1600. Yes, three displays is a rather unrealistic resolution for most of us, though it may appeal to the sci-fi lovers amongst us.
On the folding front, it unfortunately suffers from the performance issues we've all come to expect from ATI graphics cards. Stanford has halted development on the GPU2 ATI core, which is coded in such a way to take particular advantage of HD4xxx cards, so cards in the HD5xxx series will not see any performance bonuses.
You will be able to jack up your PCI-Express plugs to the Asus Ares this March.
Source: Inpai
KaySL
On: 02/25/10
