To start off, im a hobby enthusiast pc builder and im always in search of the next best thing to upgrade my computer, ive been using the nvidia 590 since the release and havent upgraded and with the release of crysis 3 i chose to get the ares ii... funny thing was my 590 is already pulling 58 fps with max settings on crysis 3 during harsh battle moments. Once i had purchased my Ares II i was excited to have 2 rads in my computer completely liquid cooled without the use of custom liquid cooling methods.
After installing the Ares II i installed the drivers from the asus website and began to play some games, little did i know i would run into a nightmare of issues, my card being #919 i was thinking it was a lack of quality being one of the last cards and maybe it was a hardware issue but i know asus wouldnt make a slip up like that. Unfortunately i had major video card crashes and screen freezes as well there was a constant screen shutter and flicker on the desktop and during gameplay, i did not have the ability to use my benchmarks because they were not compatible with the ares II drivers i assumed (turned out that ares II doesnt allow for crossfire with a single card yet).
Kept trying to play some games which i haven't had the chance to do so for a while due to long hours of work, sadly my games had much to many screen tares, fractures and texturing issues going on within my games, i couldnt even run MSAA x8 in crysis 3 which really brought me to the fact that it was a true driver issue, the card has been out for a good 2 months to the public so you would think that there would be new drivers but there was not.
There is only so much i could do from my end with my computer, i also thought maybe there was a further issue with my computer such as my motherboard pci slots or my sound card taking up to much bandwidth, i did swap my 590 for my ares and did not see an issue but i still took the computer to the shop anyways even if it would cost me a couple hundred bucks to figure out. (ended up being free)
The card came up with no issues, and was told it was a driver issue, and what the issue is that the card does not allow itself to be used in crossfire, i was a bit surprised because why would a company sell a dual gpu card if you cant even use both gpu's, apparently using crossfire with the ares II with quad gpu crossfire was working just fine? but why would using crossfire for a single card not work?, almost sounds like a hardware issue? or that crossfire worked for 2 cards because it was working in crossfire for a single gpu in each card rather than all 4 being utilized...
either way i was lucky enough that the computer store allowed me to swap my ares II card for 2 of the evga signature OC Titans which completely blow the ares II out of the water, with the ares at max load you would get 58-60 degrees and with the titan you get 68-70 degrees which wasnt to bad at all, but the FPS wow titans had 3x higher fps, but aside from the fps battle there is a lot more that the nvidia chip cards offer such as better drivers and software to run the hardware which everyone should read up on. so if anyone has an ares II just cross your fingers that it gets fixed with a driver update, either way my 2 titans even if not liquid stock cooled which i did love how esthetically beautiful the ares II was as well... I will never look back because from now on i will always stick to an nvidia chip card...
