ASUS RoG ARES 4GB Review

Core Temperature & Acoustics

For all temperature testing, the cards were placed on an open test bench with a single 120mm 1200RPM fan placed ~8” away from the heatsink. The ambient temperature was kept at a constant 22°C (+/- 0.5°C). If the ambient temperatures rose above 23°C at any time throughout the test, all benchmarking was stopped. For this test we use the 3DMark Batch Size test at it highest triangle count with 4xAA and 16xAF enabled and looped it for one hour to determine the peak load temperature as measured by GPU-Z.

For Idle tests, we let the system idle at the Vista desktop for 15 minutes and recorded the peak temperature.


The core temperatures displayed by the ARES are extremely good but that was expected considering the massive amounts of copper used for its heatsink. Unfortunately, the same can’t be said about the amount of noise it produces. ASUS claims their centrally-mounted fan produces significantly more airflow than the reference blower-style design but since there is very little to guide the air, the large fan has to work extremely hard. We doubt you would hear this when gaming but it could still be a distraction to those of us who don’t play with high in-game sound levels.

System Power Consumption

For this test we hooked up our power supply to a UPM power meter that will log the power consumption of the whole system twice every second. In order to stress the GPU as much as possible we once again use the Batch Render test in 3DMark06 and let it run for 30 minutes to determine the peak power consumption while letting the card sit at a stable Windows desktop for 30 minutes to determine the peak idle power consumption. We have also included several other tests as well.

Please note that after extensive testing, we have found that simply plugging in a power meter to a wall outlet or UPS will NOT give you accurate power consumption numbers due to slight changes in the input voltage. Thus we use a Tripp-Lite 1800W line conditioner between the 120V outlet and the power meter.


Naturally, power consumption is quite high for an ATI card setup which means it still can’t come close to the NVIDIA cards’ numbers. While the minor increase during load is likely due to the extra 2GB of memory over a pair of HD 5870 cards, the idle power consumption increase was actually quite odd to say the least. This is likely due to a combination of different components and once again the extra GDDR5 memory.