ASUS is reportedly working on its second Republic of Gamers (ROG) dual-GPU graphics card of the season, after the ROG MARS 3 we spotted at Computex. Branded under the ARES name, the card will be a CrossFire-on-a-stick solution with two Radeon HD 7870 GHz Edition "Pitcairn XT" GPUs. ASUS is probably avoiding using a pair of Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition "Tahiti XT2" chips, to prevent competition with the MARS 3, or even capture a price-point vacuum. This is ASUS' second ARES-branded graphics card. The first-generation ROG ARES was driven by a pair of Radeon HD 5870 GPUs. It is pictured below.To us, the second idea sounds more plausible. With the HD 7970 GHz Edition and GTX 680 firmly priced around the $500-$600 mark, with dual-HD 7970 cards being aplenty, priced around the $1000 mark, and of course NVIDIA's $1000 poetry on silicon (the GTX 690), there seems to be a vacuum created in the $650-$800 range, in which a graphics card that outperforms top single-GPU graphics cards, including highly-overclocked HD 7970 and GTX 680, could find room. The easiest option in front of ASUS is using a pair of 28 nm "Pitcairn XT" GPUs, which go into making the $350 Radeon HD 7870 GHz Edition graphics card. According to the source, the new ARES will pack two fully-unlocked "Pitcairn" GPUs (with complete stream processor count and memory bus width). ASUS has not finalized the clock speeds the two will ship with, but that the two will feature 2 GB of GDDR5 memory, each. The card will draw power from two 8-pin PCIe power connectors, and will have a TDP estimated to be around 300W. It's also quite likely that ASUS uses a triple-slot cooling solution, much like the first-generation ARES. Interestingly, the dual-GTX 680 MARS 3 uses a dual-slot cooler. Its tentative launch date is still being finalized. Source: VideoCardz
Read more: ASUS Working on Dual-HD 7870-based Republic of Gamers ARES by VR-Zone.com