Asus ARES Dual Radeon HD 5870 4GB Review

Before bringing this article to a close, we'd like to cover a few final data points--namely power consumption and noise. Throughout all of our benchmarking and testing, we monitored how much power our test system was consuming using a power meter. Our goal was to give you all an idea as to how much power each configuration used while idling and while under a heavy workload. Please keep in mind that we were testing total system power consumption at the outlet here, not just the power being drawn by the graphics cards alone.

Considering the Asus ARES' excellent performance, its two, fully-loaded Radeon HD 5870 GPUs and massive 4GB total frame buffer, it should come as no surprise that the card requires a lot of power. And our testing showed it was the most power hungry of the ATI-based cards by a decent margin. But it's not that far out of line with other enthusiast offerings, and in fact, the GTX 480 pulled more power under load.

While we're talking power, we should note that the Asus ARES' cooling solution is actually quieter than the stock Radeon HD 5970, so dealing with the additional power doesn't result in a louder card. We wouldn't call the card quiet under load, but it doesn't generate as much noise as a loaded 5970 or GTX 480.