ASUS ARES III ROG - The dual GPU video card with water cooling.

ASUS presented its fastest dual GPU video card. On Computex 2014 they showed the ASUS ARES III ROG video card intended to be used only with water cooling. As you can see it doesnt has any fins or fans for air cooling just two connectors for water cooling. The thing that makes this card special is not just the water cooling. Its made to take only one PCI slot. Its thin and its not taking much space. This is maybe the fastest one slot video card. The old version ASUS ARES II ROG was coming with integrated water cooling module. This time ASUS decided to leave the cooling for the end client.

ASUS ARES III ROG

This is not cheap video card with 2 Hawaii XT cores working on 1030 MHz and the chips are hand picked from other cores to have less power consumption and clock-ability, with 8GB of DDR5 RAM and only 500 units produced it will come at price of 2000$-2500$.

ASUS promise that the hand picked GPU cores will have 25% cooler performance than the reference GPU cores on a normal video card. The cooler performance will also mean that the cores will clock better and with good water-cooling block the card has really good over-clock potential. The core voltage will be digital controlled, with nice steps(like on the old ASUS cards)

There is another "cool" thing about the card. Since it is a limited edition with only 500 units produced. On every card there will be serial number from 1 to 500 (on the bottom corner of the card as seen on the picture).


Here is the official ASUS ARES III web page.
http://rog.asus.com/324562014/gaming-graphics-cards-2/ares-iii-limited-edition-unlimited-power/

AMD will add SATA Express

AMD will follow Intel and will add SATA Express in their new chip sets. SATA Express is the new upcoming interface for storage devices. Basically it is two SATA connectors bounded together. But SATA3 offers 6GB/s transfer rate and SATA Express offers 10GB/s. So this mean that two GB/s transfer speed has been lost somewhere on the road. But there are still benefits of it. Since on the market has been introduced PCI-Express solid stated drives (SSD) which allows better performance over SATA-connected device, the engineers of the big companies are trying to improve the storage device interfaces. This comes on the table especially after the improvement of the SSD technology. So for now the SATA-Express is something like doubled SATA3 interface.
The new SATA-Express and the old SATA3 connectors will be compatible and SATA3 hard-drive could be connected straight to the new connector.
Some companies like ASUS already said that their future motherboards will be SATA-Express compliant. AMD will pay to ASMedia for SIP (silicon intellectual property) for the rights to integrate the new interface controller straight in to its chips. In this way the price of the motherboard will be lower because no extra chips will be placed. And AMD will be paying licence fee for every chip with SATA-Express.

(ASMedia Technology is subsidiary of ASUSTek Computer)