ASUS Announces the ROG ARES III dual R9 290x limited addition

 ASUS as expected has announced their Republic of Gamers ARES III graphics card at Computex 2014. The ROG ARES III is simply an AMD Radeon R9 295X2 in a new form. AMD is not allowing AiB partners to use the R9 295X2 naming unless they use the reference design of the card.

The ASUS ROG ARES III will be the first single-slot ARES card to date. ASUS has gone with a full-coverage waterblock instead of the bulky liquid cooler that is on the reference R9 295X2 or even previous ARES cards. This card will not come with a pump or anything like that, you will need you own water cooling loop to run this card.his ultimate water-cooled graphics card runs 25% cooler than the reference R9 295X2. Under the Fire Strike Extreme benchmark, ROG Ares III runs 15% faster than GTX Titan Z. In 4K Ultra High Definition (3840x2160) resolution, it runs Battlefield 4 at an incredible 33% greater frame rate.

The card is expected to have a fully custom-designed DIGI+VRM that will include a large number of power phases (the ARES II had a 20-phase VRM). The full-coverage water block for the card has been made by EK Water Blocks. This block will cover both GPU’s, the memory, bridge chip and VRM’s. ASUS suggests that you use at least a 120 mm x 3 radiator to, “extract maximum performance for the card”. ASUS says they will provide a list of recommended water cooling systems at launch. There is also an ARES logo on the card that lights up bright red when you have your system powered on.

The card will be clocked at 1030 MHz with the 8 GB (4 GB per GPU), clocked at the reference 5 GHz (effective) clock speed. The ARES III will only have 3 display connections which include DVH, HDMI and DisplayPort. The card is expected to be released sometime in the 3rd quarter of this year.

Asus ROG Ares III Specifications

Model name	ARESIII-8GD5
Graphics engine	AMD Radeon R9 290X x2
Bus standard	OpenGL 4.4
Video memory	8GB GDDR5
Engine clock	1030MHz
Memory clock	5000MHz
Memory interface	512-bit x2
Digital max resolution	4096 X 2160
DVI output	1 x Native Dual-link DVI-D
HDMI output	1 x Native HDMI
HDCP compliant	Yes
DisplayPort	1 x Native DisplayPort 1.2
Adapters/cables bundled	3 x Power cable 1 x AMD Radeon Gold Reward game coupon 2 x G1/4 threaded fitting 1 x ROG 8GB USB flash drive
Software bundled	ASUS utilities and driver GPU Tweak
Dimensions	5.67 x 11.81in