While sitting at the ASUS OC Summit we came across a very interesting little graphics cards.  Actually, it's not so little.

While the card we are showing here is a production sample, ASUS assures us that it will be available in about 2 months or so.  The ASUS ARES as it is called is a dual-GPU Evergreen product with a pair of TRUE HD 5870 GPUs - not a combination of underclocked HD 5870 GPUs like the Radeon HD 5970 released back in November.

In fact, the HD 5870 Cypress cores are overclocked slightly past the default 850 MHz - though how much ASUS hasn't shown us yet.  Also, the card features 4GB of GDDR5 frame buffer - 2GB per GPU!

But all of this will cost you a bit of power - notice in the photo above that the ARES card will require two 8-pin power connections AND a 6-pin power connection.  Gulp. 

We are eager to see some performance numbers from the card and hopefully I'll be able to post those later this afternoon.  Stay tuned!!

UPDATE: We were able to snag an image from GPU-Z on the system:

A little blurry, but you get the point

With a score of more than 28.4k on the GPU result in a quick run of 3DMark Vantage, the ASUS ARES dual HD 5870 graphics card is easily the fastest single card we have ever tested!  For comparison, the GeForce GTX 480 scored 17,287 while the stock Radeon HD 5970 (dual HD 5850s essentially) scored 21,111.  Obviously with a CPU score of 24,920 ASUS has an overclocked CPU at work, but for GPU score comparisons, this gives the ARES a 34% performance advantage over any other single card available.

The ARES looks to be FAST - but be prepared to PAY to get it.