Installation And Overclocking the ARES
Lifting the Asus ARES out of the case, it becomes apparent that this is one heck of a heavy graphics card. The huge 11"x5" beast weighs a bit more than two reference Radeon HD 5870 cards, and the PCB is a full inch taller. The ARES is even more than one and a half times heavier than the reference Radeon HD 5970. The card is so wide that it monopolizes three expansion slots worth of space, though it's only secured via a two-slot bezel. To help visualize the bulk of the ARES, the following image shows it beside a reference Radeon HD 5870. Keep in mind, the Radeon HD 5870 is no small fry:
Never before have I been concerned about the health of my system due to the weight of a graphics card, but I'll admit that the thought of mounting this four pound behemoth to a motherboard makes me a little nervous.
Regardless, I dropped it in for the sake of testing. As you can see in the following image, Asus beefed up the frame of the card so that the bezel shoulders a lot of the weight and stress. In fact, the company claims its card employs double the structural reinforcement of a reference design.
With the card installed, I turned my attention to the drivers, discovering some interesting news: AMD's reference Catalyst 10.6 drivers may detect the card, but they don't seem to work properly, and even cause a few crashes. This is one of those few cases (Sapphire's Radeon HD 4850 X2 being one of the most memorable) where you'll have to rely on a third-party board vendor for custom drivers. ASUS strongly recommends a fresh windows install for the card, but this isn't necessarily a reasonable solution for people who are happy with their OS the way it is. In this case, ASUS recommends uninstalling the ATI driver normally, rebooting and uninstalling the the driver again via the device manager, and after that removing all remnants of ATI drivers with the Driver Sweeper utility before rebooting and installing the ASUS ARES driver.
Overclocking the ARES
For those in search of more than the ARES' stock performance, Asus supplies its SmartDoctor overclocking utility. Power users will be happy to know that this piece of software allows voltage modification for increased scaling potential.
First, the good news. The voltage tweaking feature of the SmartDoctor utility allows us to reach a stable 1003 MHz core speed and a 1275 MHz GDDR5 memory clock (5100 MHz effective) with the voltage increased to 1.3 V. Getting a Cypress GPU to 1 GHz+ is a difficult task for a single Radeon HD 5870, and even more so with a couple of Radeon HD 5870's in CrossFire. So, this result is extremely impressive and speaks to the engineering effort at Asus, from design to cooling.
Unfortunately, the ARES' fan gets quite loud under load to keep temperatures low, as we see in our benchmarks later on. We also experienced after a crash caused by overclocking the card too far and the SmartDoctor utility attempted to reboot using the failed overclock setting, causing an inescapable crashing loop. We fixed this by removing the SmartDoctor utility in safe mode, and this issue disappeared completely after a fresh Windows install.
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