Asus preparing Nvidia Fermi version of Ares graphics card monstrosity

Already making a statement with its ATI-based Ares graphics card -- a $1,200 beast that yokes together a pair of Radeon HD 5870 GPUs in a single board -- Asus is now moving on to an Nvidia version of the beast.

Based around the new Fermi architecture, this Ares would pull together two GeForce GTX 480s, each with 480 stream processors and 1.5GB of DDR3 RAM. UK Web site Bit-tech.net received some images of this new Ares in PCB state, so it's unclear what kind of cooling or casing the ultimate product will have, but the ATI version sported heat sinks and a fan -- and also weighed 5 pounds.

No matter how it looks or how much it weights, one thing's for sure: Asus won't make many of these new Ares, and they'll be charging an awful lot for them. The ATI-based Ares runs $1,200 and there's no doubt that an Nvidia version will cost at least that amount, if not more.

[Image: Bit-tech.net]