Most Expensive $4500 Quad GPU Setup from 2010 - ASUS ARES CrossFire
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- Опубликовано: 26 июл 2024
- Patreon: / fullybuffered
If you wanted the craziest, most exclusive GPU setup in 2010, it was this- two ASUS ARES in CrossFire. In today’s money the would have costed around $4500. But now in 2022; how well do they perform? Could they still outperform a GTX 1080?
My Twitter: FullyBuffered
0:00 - Intro
0:28 - Two ARES
0:51 - 2010 GPU situation
1:25 - ARES Design and Specs
1:59 - Massive Cooling
3:03 - Setting it up
3:27 - Crysis 2 Live Demo and Power
5:43 - Benchmark: Tomb Raider
6:09 - Benchmark: 3DMark Sky Diver
6:30 - Benchmark: Crysis 2
6:58 - Benchmark: Unigine
7:18 - Benchmark: BF4
7:34 - GTA IV on Quad CF
7:52 - Conclusion 
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Crysis 2 and 3 has amazing crossfire support. Few years ago I tried a radeon 7970 and 7990 in crossfire (3 gpus total) and it was getting 80-120fps at ultra settings 1440p with 95%+ scaling pretty amazing
Could you imagine a quad-SLI setup of 4090s? I dont even think you could cool that much wattage reasonably tbh. Its also insane that these halo level, dual-GPUs have a TGP of ~300w and now mid-high end cards eclipse that now. Wild stuff
I remember seeing the Ares come out and being in awe at the thought of this exact scenario. I did see a lot of people do this but with the later 7990, which was an absolute behemoth in heat and size. I think I read a couple articles talking about the 7990's hitting well over 100c and outright crashing in some scenarios, but another commenter says they ran 7970 AND 7990 for triple GPU, which is something I never really thought about... might have to track some of these GPUs down, just to save them from being tossed away and lost to history. This period was amazing for AMD...
I discovered your channel recently and you show really cool and niche hardware! Keep up the good work!
Thank you! :)
Same
Hope that the tech giants will recognize you in the coming time. You do an incredible job with your videos and hope that, like me, more people will subscribe to your channel so we can see more of this fun stuff! Greets from Sweden!
Many thanks for the kinds words! :)
It's interesting that the average scales pretty well in some select games, but it seems that usually the 1% and 0.1% lows barely budge.
Great work, and especially tenacity working through all those crashes to get this done though!
Thanks man! Yeah the 1% and 0.1% lows barely changed, which was the same with the 4x 6870s. I’d love to know where the bottleneck is, but oh well.
Those 1% lows im guessing are from the CPU and RAM.
@@4gbmeans4gb61 I think that's probably the latency from one chip to another (or better, one chip to three others) plus driver management of memory
Pixelpipes! You and Fully buffered should do a collab at some time in the future!
@@4gbmeans4gb61 No as FB used the same CPU and RAM on the Nvidia GTX 1080 and many other cards and it was fine! It is due to inherent limitations limitations when you run multiple GPUS together.
Mate, this is the perfect setup for winter. Frustration from stability and drivers will keep your heart pumping faster thus raising your body temperature and the cards will double as a space heater :)
we got the joke at winter mate, the rest was just redundant.
3:22 It was like powering on a car engine. Nice!
OH MAN THIS TAKES ME BACK! That arms race was hilarious! Back then it was really team red and team green trading blows. You could get close to the ares with 4x GTX470s, I ran mine with dangerden blocks and 360mm radiators from Swiftech. I believe bitspower made a full-cover waterblock for this one. As far as oc-ing these you needed a 1500W PSU with a fat single rail like the ones from OCZ and some wacky company made a PSU that was around 1800-2000w but had massive external PSUs or 350w individual PSUs that could go into a 5.25 drive bay and be triggered on by your main 24 pin with a Y connector. Wacky days and times.
Ha nice - quad watercooled GTX 470s sounds awesome, that must have been quite a build to keep running.
@@FullyBuffered Pulled every bit of 1400W in Octane Render and Maya. Kinda wish I kept it.
Bruh, you have god tier ASMR voice. I keep your videos running so I can sleep. Thanks for helping my insomnia.
Ha thanks!
I remember my first go at a high end pc was with 2 gtx 690's in quad sli. For the time that thing was a beast and looked great
This is truly rare I still can't believe you have two.
Thank you to the algorithm for suggesting your channels. So many look back at 20th century retro computers. You are digging in at just the spot that most people forget about as they age before it gets popular at the 20+ plus zone... on top of that you make these videos well and I enjoy your style.
Many thanks for the kind words, I am to glad to hear that!
This man is highly underrated. He shows some cool old school stuff that you could only dream of back in the day, with tons of great info. Really goes to show tech moves so fast especially in pc hardware it is a waste to go uber high-end if you are someone like me who likes to upgrade every 2 years or so.
OH LET ME TELL YOU About Crossfire, I could literally talk for hours about various set ups I have run over the years, was running Dual 290X's, water-cooled, up until recently when I finally upgraded to a Radeon VII. I was so very sad to have gotten rid of the as rare as your Ares, PowerColor Dual Core R9 290X, it was the most unstable thing in the world but i loved it dearly and I would say by now it would be in a landfill somewhere and will probably never find another one in NZ i would bet. If you would like to talk more, please be in touch, I do run a tech podcast and would be honoured to have you on if it would be something you would be interested in! have been following your content for a while now and love the indepth nature and the weird and whacky configs you show us on your channel! If not, then I will look forward to seeing you in the next one!
Thanks for the kinds words! :)
@@FullyBuffered no worries at all! You put in a lot of hard work and that has to be recognized! As i say though would absolutely love to talk more, so let me know
This channel is a gem for PC MASTER Race. I wish i could get my hands on these no longer valuable pieces of hardware history, sadly i live in a 3rd world country. I just made my nostalgia trip by building a pc strictly for playing Games that are supported by windows vista since i always wanted to experience that OS in its full glory but i didn't have a good pc at the time it was released. I7 980X AND GTX 590 I mainly just eat snacks and keep staring at the OS background and taking all the bliss from the nostalgia or playing Fallout 3, Fallout NV, Halo or GTA 4 on SLI. Thanks man and i wrote this comment because i think from your videos you are the kind of guy who loves dive into the past.
Man your content is something special. Sub earned
That is nuts! I always love reading or watching about exotic and unique setups, dreaming to have some one day. Great Video!
I wonder, I saw some cards with dual GT 610 core from ultrasound machines in Asia, and they can be used as normal GPUs. I can link you the article if you were interested, sadly I got no idea how to obtain one.
Many thanks! I am interested in that article
Quadro NVS. Theres 2 dual G98 based cards (256mb GDDR3 per chip, NVS 440/450) and a dual NV43 based card (440) with 128mb GDDR3 on package(!). All these cards have display out, with the 450 having 4 normal displayports even. These cards are stupid cheap on ebay. OC competition anyone? I'd love an excuse to buy 10 of these and bin out the best sets of cores and memory :P
Amazing content and very thorough reviews of outdated hardware. I love it.
Unsure of why you came up; but subbed for life. This was brilliant content.
interesting times when sli/crossfire was a thing for a common person with a deep wallet.
It somehow made sense when the programmer created support for a dual card setup in a game or a piece of software!
I think the dual graphics card thing died out with the 10xx series graphics cards.
It was definitely on its way out by the time Pascal arrived - but that series was the death blow to it - as after that, the consensus became “just go for single cards”.
and a current GPU SLI or crossfire will go above 600W for the cards alone at the minimum
Cards just became good enough to play at 1080p and 1440p, that the cost to maintain a dual GPU graphics car was not worth anymore. In 2010 the goal was 1080p60 High settings with the enthusiast craving for 1440p, but with that last one, you needed more than an HD5870. The reason people didnt find use for a dual 780ti back in 2013 was because 4K tech was not big for gaming compared to 1440p and the 780ti itself was already 600€. There was the 2x760 but only good for the price, and there was the 2x295 which was the way AMD found to compete with 780ti, and people gone with 780ti because single GPU = no issues, and 780ti was well enough to play at 1440p. After that people stopped considering dual GPU for gaming.
Better without them. It is fun making a cheap retro beast though.
Love this channel! Cool collectors items!
Thanks!
Really cool cards! Thank you for sharing them!
You’re welcome!
this channel is so incredibly underrated, subscribed!
Many thanks! :)
I like the articulate and calm approach to technology portrayed across your channel. Subbed.
Thank you! :)
your channel is super cool. i enjoyed your 2 videos i've seen so far. keep it up
Thanks!
I just saw the Ares video for the 2nd time yesterday . Funny that today you have this for us . Absolutely stunning you have two.
Thanks!
I remember when the ARES released! I wanted one so badly but they were sooo hard to get! Subbed just because you have not one but two of these beast cards, I always wanted one!
Amazing! I loved these crazy cards back in the day.
My new favorite channel on RUclips. I've been binge watching your videos.
Thanks! I hope you have been enjoying them!
🤘Metal🤘
Seriously, this was the most bonkers PC hardware you could ever hope for back in 2010/2011
welcome to the youtube algo , your about to blow up im sure and you deserve it as you put a lot of work in your videos plus your voice has the ASMR thing about it. good content to .....hold tight your about to get super busy
Many thanks! :)
Triple XFX 5870 crossfire setup back in 2011, had an Antech 1200w psu and an i7 920. It was a beast, then traded them for a 3 XFX R9 390 setup. I miss that pc.
awesome vid bud very nice job!
Thanks!
Another great video, Mr Buffered! I ran a crossfire setup for a short time some years ago, two HD 6950s. I originally had one and then a family member upgraded his setup and gave me his HD 6950. Heat and especially noise were a big issue so I ended up buying 2 Arctic Accellero GPU coolers (I forget which model but they were "silent" fanless models so they were oversize with farther spread apart fins but still not as big as today's top cards) and the system ran great for a while. But some months later one of the cards died (the HIS brand card that was given to me, the other was XFX) and ended my adventures with Crossfire. I forgot which games I was playing at the time (possibly Just Cause 2 was one) and it was awesome having the game run almost double the speed from using just one card!
Thanks for sharing!
And also i must add. I love this channel. It teaches me how much graphics cards have changed and improved.
Thank you!
I get confused when people are nostalgic for SLI while simultaneously complaining about large, expensive, power hungry modern GPUs...
Man i am obsessed with SLI/Crossfire, keep doing these videos even though they take time and a LOT of effort to get things running for a disappointing low number of games.
I saw the name ARES, and my memories over drooling for these cards online came back.
Great video!
Thank you!
Great work! Subbed!
Thank you!
Sniper Elite 4 was one of the last games with great crossfire support. :) edit: dang DX12!
This channel should be much larger. This
Seemed like something LTT would do. I would be cool if you could let them borrow those cards to do their own video and give you a shout to boost traffic.
Thanks!
Found your channel recently as well, algorithm hard at work seems greetings from Rotterdam, also how are you so calm and collected working with computers :)
Thank you! The key is not to rush it - this video has been in the works for moths and in between I have been working on other projects
I hope all is well my friend.
Here in 2023, running a brand new AMD Ryzen 5 5600X and a lightly used RTX 2080 Super makes me glad things have come a long way since 2010 lol. And while my graphics card may already be "long-in-the-tooth" in 2023 for the newest titles, I am very happy with the performance in the hundreds of games I have up to Cyberpunk 2077 patch 2.0 and the expansion. Even back when this was THE thing, I never wanted a dual card setup. To me, it was just a waste unless the GPUs shared the same card. Even then, single GPU performance changed so fast that multi GPU setups stopped again. The only boost I would have liked is maybe using a second on card GPU for PhysX when that was still a huge thing, but now single GPUs just do it well by default it seems.
OMG, this setup was my wet dream!
This would've been my dream setup when I was young and first really getting into computers. I always remember dreaming about the higher end 5000 series radeon cards specifically, but the 5770 was a budget beast for its time.
This guy is so underrated
Thanks! Please do share with people who you think might also enjoy these videos :)
woah really nice, dream RIG
Oh my, you getting one of these was already a damn miricle, Now two? congrats, I haven't seen any selling in my country since 2013
Thanks! Yeah it was very lucky. Funnily enough both had adverts without any photos or further info, so I gambled and bought them sight unseen lol
nice one fella😶🌫
I have 8 of each of the special edition 4GB 5970 from ASUS, Sapphire, and XFX, Yes, the one that came in a gun case...
combine this with quad opteron setup and you have free house heating
Also the reason 1 of them is so hot is because you have it blocked off by the other card, if you have a board that can do x16 (x99 boards and a few X79 boards have it??) you should stick in on the end slot, and I dont know if there is a longer crossfire cable, i think there is, but anyways great video man, thats so siiiicccckkkkkk
3:20 A sound more impressive than the THX intro
I remember when these cards came out. They're Mad. I had two 4890s in Crossfire for a short period, it was So bad I sold the 2nd card to a friend lol.
Great video, beautiful cards
I found that Catalyst 13.3 worked well for pushing 3/4way xfire Terascale setups on windows 7 (both HD 6K and 5K), though it is probably not the most stable for games. Might help to boost your Skydiver score though, I got 51K graphics with a ~ 1000Mhz 6970 and ~ 975 6990 combo (3 cards). very epic to see these ares gpus in action
All the best
Thanks! I did try older drivers (iirc even 13.3) but found performance to decrease in 3DMark. 15.7 and 16.2 seemed to provide the best performance
I have 2 of the Asus Ares 3 dual GPU water cooled video cards running in crossfire on a Rampage 5 Extreme and a Intel core i7 5960x 8 core running at 5.00GHZ. It works pretty well although suitable crossfire fire drivers have been discontinued several years ago.
This is functionally equivalent to four full fat HD5870. Even one of those would be a dream back in the day. Amazing setup.
Thanks!
Jooo xD i need Mars 1 and 2 for my Collection but to hard to find🥲
Very great video!
Thanks!
I think with amd cards in general they are much more picky with drivers when running 4 GPUs. It's sometimes hard to find the correct version but once you get a good one it's great.
Yup that’s my experience as well - either it doesn’t work well, or it works really well. SLI seems way more robust in comparison.
I kind of wish the industry stuck with SLI, it would have been a godsend if it was still around today and all the kinks were worked out, the drivers matured etcm especially in this era of expensive high end graphics...
ARES was my dream card back then
Oh my bloody goodness!
Keep making more videos.
I love this sort of stuff.
I've had HD 5870 CF and R9 290 CF, actually the latter one was surprisingly fine, even in 2019. I still have 2x 4890 to play with when I tinker around with my LGA 775 platform.
I do miss the Glory Days of SLI and Crossfire they were fun
Haven’t seen a vid from you in awhile. Hope you are doing well.
Wait 10-15 Years, and Crossfire/SLI its back! ;D
Quite interesting, thanks for your efforts, it must have been a pain in the ass to get it working. The bad thing about crossfire or SLI is that it has terrible frame pacing, that can be seen on the 1% low.
Or even ares alone for that matter, as it is dual GPU. In that case, Crossfire isn't much worse, lol.
I've played with crossfire a and SLI back in the days of the HD3870 and the GTX300.. wow i am showing my age there. Both were all ways twitchy, and were HUGELY impacted by drivers and games. More so crossfire than SLI. however SLI had many restrictions on it that crossfire did not. for instance SLI you needed the literal exact same card to enable it where as with Cross fire you could mix and match, even a 3850 could be paired to a 3870. However the extra hardware flexibility was pretty much canceled out by the instablity and inconsistent performance
Thanks for sharing! And yeah with CF there is more wiggle room for slightly mismatched setups.
Two of these cards must weight as much as your entire open-air bench
Ha it might be close yeah 😁
There was also sapphire toxic 5970 2x2gb VRAM and xfx black . Rare cards miners were hunting them in 2015 and 16 for mining
Ha yes that’s right, I recall seeing mining setups with 5970s - poor cards lol
@@FullyBuffered I was thinking same 10y ago but now my opinion is that mining industry is pushing Gpu development and after every cycle there is bunch of ultra cheap cards. Used rtx3080 will go sub 200$ after 15th september crash.
@@nikolakarovic5964 IF the merge happens.
It really is funny in a way to see four GPUs being trounced by a single one just 6 years newer.
Comparably, a 1080 today is 6 years old and I dare say you will not find a single GPU today that is more than 4-6 times faster than one of those (issues with CF scaling not withstanding). Hell even a 3090 Ti is not much more than twice as fast iirc.
Solid work and a fascinating product to look back on, especially as a previous 5870 owner.
Thank you!
The most insane video card I ever had was an R9 280x Matrix Platinum. I will buy an Ares 1, 2, or 3 if I'll ever find one with a correct price.
I have a pair of the HD5870 Stingers in my old gaming system.......and they were always unstable, its why I switched to back to Nvidia for my next build
I tried for almost a week once to get two 5970s to play ball and eventually gave up after one of the cards died I never completed the video one of my all-time Ls
Hey Timmy thanks for stopping by - hope you’re doing well 👍
Sad to hear the 5970s didn’t work out, those were some finicky cards I’ve heard..
Good old days :)))
I too have two of these cards and in their aluminium cases where they originally shipped. Sadly only one of the two cases is complete set other is missing some papers and a mice. other on the otherhand is full set.
I've never ran a system in crossfire or SLI but it feels like the issues caused with the compatibility doesn't justify the performance gain, I would honestly say having more than a single GPU would only be reasonable if you needed the extra Vram for rendering CGI scenes for film production.
Make sure you use the last Beta driver to get Terrascale working at most optimal speeds, I have a HD 6990 and the AMD Crimson beta 16.4.1 is the driver set I recommend hereby also enable Frame pacing this should help a lot when it comes to micro stuttering and other issues.
It seems you used the wrong drivers due to the issues you have been showing.
These days cards like those are pure collectors items, you could try running games from it's time.
Far Cry 1 & 2 or Crysis 1, these would do a lot better than newer gen games, for example
A thought to consider - maybe,try to re-test it with the Nimez drivers?
the weirdest configuration i have ever managed to build was a 3 way crossfire with an asus rog 3850x2 and a single 3850. cmr dirt ran like hell with that. man i miss my 3850x2
Incredible to find 2 of them. Which driver did you end up using in the end? I might try quadfire hd5970 myself.
Please do! :) In the end I used 15.7. 16.2 should give the same performance, but It was even less reliable in getting quad CF to stick and not crash immediately.
Great video love some old hardware I still have my i7 920 X58 platform with a GTX 970 but back in 2010 I did test 2x GTX 460 vs 2x HD5770 in windows 7 and the SLI scaled much better than CF I never tried CF again after that but would be curious to see what 2x RX6600 would do on my Z590 Intel platform
Is crossfire still supported for RX 6000 series?
@@bestopinion9257 I mean crossfire is the only option on newer Intel mobo my Z590 supports crossfire only and I have a RX6600 all depends on the games as not all support Crossfire
@@itzamedave6242 OK. I thought AMD does not support crossfire (with drivers) anymore and RX 6000 series is relatively new.
damn the still look sexy after all these years , i LOVE first gen Ares
Too bad they cheaped out on the vram on the Mars 2
I agree - 1.5GB was simply not enough, especially since they were selling 3GB 580s at the time. Even this older ARES had more VRAM..
@@FullyBuffered their excuse was that pcie gen 2 wouldnt be able to utilize it lol , what a bunch of lies but thats Ngreedia
I still own one of those cards but i would recommend buying 2xGTX 580 3GB over one Mars 2 card
Witcher is really good with SLI btw
I wish they made an ares 4 with dual rtx 4090 @ 3ghz
8x8 pin connectors, a custom Power supply in the box with a small water chiller cooler .
The package should cost 5000$
>790W
Nvidia lovelace: ✍✍📝📝
I’m looking forward to those cards haha
Very interesting. Way to stick it out. Sounds like a irritating setup to work with, although very cool.
You should have gone with anermine zone drivers and used w10. It would have saved you a whole lot of trouble and you would be getting the latest drivers
They should bring up the Ares lineup
I would love to see a modern card with similar build quality and attention to detail.
looking at the temps one of the coolers may not have been mounted properly, you can see the one gpu has significantly higher temps.
SO YOU'RE THE GUY THAT STOLE ALL THE GODDAMN FUCKING 5870 X2S
These crossfire and mutigpu setups seemed so cool at the time but we have learned they were pretty dumb and had so many issues. Most people have moved back to single gpu systems now of days.
Crossfire (and SLI) have actual VRAM by this formula: Total crosfire VRAM / 2 . Which means these gpu system has 4GB VRAM available. This is due to mirroring of data of each GPU chip and it's VRAM to other GPU chips+ Its VRAM's. This was a huge letdown in implicit mgpu implementation (SLI/Crossfire). That was rectified by DX12 which uses explicit mgpu topology and all of 8GB of VRAM will be usable, but mgpu is all but dead novadays.
Great video. What an amazing find. I have a question, what are those round cylinder looking things on the fin assembly you see @ 2:47? Do they alro get rid of heat?
Thanks! Those are end (or beginning, depending how you look) of the copper heatpipes which indeed transfer heat!
Thanks! Those are end (or beginning, depending how you look) of the copper heatpipes which indeed transfer heat!
Thanks! Those are end (or beginning, depending how you look) of the copper heatpipes which indeed transfer heat!
@@FullyBuffered oh wow. So those black cylinder things below the copper heatpipes @ 2:52 (better view of what i am talking about) are the begining or the ending of the copper heatpipes?
I'm kinda glad I didn't get one of these, all those years ago. I don't think I could handle my pc sounding like its trying to blow away imaginary leaves the whole time.
I wish they still made copper heatsinks for mainstream parts