Power Consumption
And here's where pushing two power-hungry Tahiti GPUs as far as they'll go comes back to bite you. If our power consumption benchmarks were Star Wars, then Asus' Ares II is the evil Emperor. We're not sure if the company's engineers were paying attention to the PCI Express electromechanical specification or what. But the card goes well over the 525 W that one 16-lane slot and three eight-pin connectors are rated for. It comes close to doubling what a GeForce GTX 690 uses, and exceeds HIS' worst-case measurement by more than 50 W.
Bear in mind that those are card-only numbers; they aren't representative of the entire system. While we'll acknowledge that Asus built-in some headroom for overclocking, and suggest that you can bring power consumption down a bit by undervolting the Ares' GPUs, these are the numbers you'll see out of the box. Brutal.





- Adding Asus' Ares II To Our High-End Benchmark Results
- The Benchmark System
- Asus ROG Ares II: The Challenger
- The Competition: Two Dual-Tahiti Cards And GeForce GTX 690
- Synthetic Benchmarks
- Gaming Benchmarks
- Noise And Temperatures
- Power Consumption
- A Page In History: The World’s Fastest Dual-GPU Card
hope it doesnt cost a kidney
I've nothing against the Dual 7970s but just want to let consumers be aware of the pros and cons especially the cards are not for the meek of wallet.
If you live in Australia and have a spare $1900 you can still get your hands on one.
I actually had a chance to own a 690 so I went for it and, upon the next reboot, I was greeted by a black screen. Yay. I looked on the web and, as expected, others were suffering with the same issue. An ebay auction later and I'm back to 2x 660s in sli. The moral of the story is: Just because it's expensive doesn't mean it'll work
http://www.pcper.com/reviews/Graphics-Cards/Frame-Rating-GeForce-GTX-Titan-GeForce-GTX-690-Radeon-HD-7990-HD-7970-Cross-6