14 DAY TRIAL // Just yesterday we were reporting on ASUS’ dual-GPU ARES video card based on AMD’s Radeon HD 7870 “Pitcairn” chips. It seems now that the company has axed the project and that they are concentrating on the Radeon HD 7970 X2 instead.
Taiwanese company ASUS gave up on the ARES project using the “Pitcairn” GPUs.
The reason behind the move seems to be the manufacturing and development cost of the device.
Now, a single Radeon HD 7870 card costs the end-user around $350.
Two GPUs with twice the memory on the same PCB would have probably amounted to $750, considering the need of a PCI-Express bridge likely manufactured by IDT’s PLX.
The BOM would not be just as high, but there are design costs involved along with the cost of the custom cooling system, and it seems that ASUS reportedly decided not to bother anymore.