First look review: New Asus Republic of Gamers GPUs and motherboards

Friday, May 28th, 2010

Asus’ latest showcase highlighted a quartet of new products from its enthusiast-level Republic of Gamers range and, as usual, we didn’t come away disappointed – after all, the Taiwanese firm showed us the heaviest graphics card we’ve ever seen.

It’s called the Ares, is named after the Greek god of war and features two ATI Radeon HD 5870 graphics chips strapped to one PCB. The choice of ATI graphics is certainly interesting: the last card in this range, the Mars, was named after the Roman god of war and included a pair of Nvidia GeForce GTX 285 cards. We’re assuming that the heat generated by Nvidia’s latest graphics cards is part of the reason for Asus’ switch of allegiances.

The list of specifications is mouth-watering. The combined GPUs boast 3,200 stream processors, each runs at 850MHz, and four gigabytes of GDDR5 memory is crammed onto the packed PCB. Asus’ own benchmarks, run in 3DMark Vantage, show a 25% increase in speed over a Radeon HD 5970.

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Just in: a monster PC from Mesh

Monday, June 16th, 2008

It’s fair to say that we were quite impressed by the Chillblast Fusion Juggernaut. A powerful 9800 GX2 graphics card, Core 2 Quad Q9450 processor and 24in Samsung screen certainly made an impression in the Labs – and it made everyone who saw it quite jealous. We all wanted one.

Except that I now have a feeling that the Juggernaut’s crown as top monster PC may be under threat. We’ve just taken delivery of the Mesh Ultimate XT9450 GTO and, well – to paraphrase the slogan of a particularly nasty meat snack – it’s a bit of an animal. As you can see, it’s housed inside a monolithic Cooler Master Cosmos, which is certainly a good start.

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Why cars and PCs are a potent mix

Monday, May 26th, 2008

There are times in my life when I feel that I’m not quite dedicated enough to the computing cause, and this weekend was one of those times. I found myself in a field around five miles away from Sleaford in Lincolnshire, and it’s fair to say my fellow field dwellers outgeeked me – because they’d all taken the time and effort to fit PCs into their cars.

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