by popular demand we are finally going to be taking a look at the ASUS Aries
limited edition graphics card so only a th000 of these were produced worldwide
and this is the box like seriously that
is the box for One graphics card it's
like it looks like it could contain a good siiz gaming notebook anyway we've
already taken the Aries uh briefcase out
of the box and this is what it looks
like so if you buy Aries you will get something that looks like this it looks
like a briefcase full of money it has a little Aries logo on it right
here and it is lockable so uh if you're
transporting your video card and it's not inside your system you there's
actually combination locks right here so you can set two separate combinations
one for each side uh they're they're set to Zero by default so that you can
actually get it open it comes with a little booklet attached to the outside
that says uh birth of a legend uh talks
about the the packaging that they've uh
that they've used on this particular product to make it really stand out
makings of a beast so they're saying it's going to
outperform even the radon 5970 by over
32% so what the Aries does is instead of
using two cut down 5870 cores it uses
two complete 5870 cores a fully custom
cooler and we're going to have a really close look at the cooler it's just um
outstanding and Incredibly heavy and um
that is how the aies achieves this
fastest single graphics card
performance ever Benchmark that it does
okay so let's have a look at what we have in terms of accessories we have one crossfire Bridge we have two PCI Express
six pin dual six pin to single 8 Pin
adapters because this this card
requires a lot of power connectors next
we've got a DVI to HDMI
adapter okay then we have a little Republic of Gamers case badge that you
can put on your case and finally we have
an ASUS Republic of Gamers gaming
mouse it's a laser mouse we can tell cuz it says class one laser product on the
bottom all right it's pretty straightforward looking you got your Mouse wheel you got two side buttons
here you got a nice little rubberized grip DPI switch anyway we are not here
to see the mouse we are here to see the graphics card king of all graphics cards
right now oh there's a couple more things holy cow it's heavy okay button
functions uh oh okay so there's a manual for the mouse uh there's a driver for
the mouse uh here's a little quick start guide and here's how to operate the
combination locks there you go as well as a VGA driver and manual don't use
that download the latest drivers if you're not downloading the latest
drivers for a card like this uh you should probably be smacked
because yeah you just should that's just
how it works okay so we'll put those back in there and let's have a look at
the Aries so the first thing you should probably notice about this card it is is
it is longer taller and wider than most other
graphics cards on the market right now in terms of outputs we've got our usual
suspects for uh uh for Ati ifinity so we
have there goes a car alarm of all things we better just pause this for now
and we're back sorry about that so we have two DVI HDMI so that means you can
hook up two normal DVI monitors just using an adapter here and then we have
one DisplayPort Port so will you need to use an active adapter or a display
port monitor in in order to run three display off this graphics card we've got
an empty slot here so that some of the cooling uh capability of this cooler is
going to be blown out the back and the battery ran out so we're going to try
this one more time we talked about the connectors we talked about how some of
the heat is going to be exhausted from the back let's talk about this cooler a
little bit because the cooler on the Aries is
completely 100% custom so it starts in
the Middle with a 100 mm fan now this is
not your average VGA fan solution it
uses an extremely thick fan for high
static pressure so you can see how forward swep these blades are and how
deep they go compared to a typical VGA fan and what it needs that for is in
order to push air through these dense
copper fin Arrangements that are each
okay each containing not only the copper
fin structure but four 8 mm heat pipes
so there's one of these coolers on each of the 5870 cores on this graphics card
so like I said before it is more like a
5870 X2 and not like a 5970 because a
5970 has two gpus that are kind of like
either a cut down 5870 or a beefed up
5850 it's somewhere in between no these are true 5870 cores and as such they
have power requirements that go a little bit beyond what you'd find with a
typical dual graphics card solution so this card takes one six pin PCIe
connector and two 8 Pin PCI connectors
to run just one Aries card in your computer ASUS recommends a 750w power
supply with 40 amps on the 12volt rail that's to run one I mean if you're even
going to have uh three PCI Express connectors you better have um a dual
graphics card ready power supply in the first place on the back of the card
let's have a look at the cooling once again this is a thick aluminum plate
that has little uh ribs in it to get a little bit better heat dissipation but
basically you can see this is incredibly thick compared to the back plates that
we typically see on a graphics card and the reason for that is that it has to
cool the memory that is located on the back of the card so this card has 4 gigs
of memory compared to this the normal 2
gigs on a 5970 so that gives you double
the frame buffer now in terms of other features to
talk about oh yeah uh so I mentioned that it was that it was longer uh wider
and taller than most graphics cards so here just for comparison I have another
uh fairly beefy graphics card with a a fairly legit looking cooler on it this
is a GTX 480 and I just want to do a
quick size comparison so I'm going to go ahead and put down the Aries right
here and I just want to show show you how big this graphics card is compared
to a typical one so that is a standard height graphics
card so you can see that the crossfire connector is located a good inch higher
than the PCI Express or PCI back plate right here that means that this card is
significantly taller than most other graphics cards on the mark in fact
almost all leather graphics cards on the market even with the heat pipes on the
GTX 480 that can cause clearance issues with some cases it's significantly
shorter than the Aries now that's
something that you really want to be aware of if you want to install one of these cards you got to make sure that
your case is going to have enough room for this graphics card another cool
feature I wanted to show you ASUS does support through software uh voltage
tweaking on this card so they're saying that you can get dramatically better
performance when you overclock the Aries and this thing is designed from the
ground up to just pump voltage through it to overclock the snot out of it
because if you're buying the ultimate graphics card you better be getting the
ultimate performance so you can see not only on the back but also on the front
we've got huge aluminum plates that
cover all of the heat producing components other than the gpus and the
voltage regulation here which is covered by copper so you can see it goes down
there under the fan as well you've got that ribbed aluminum heat sink and then
it comes all the way around see up here on the top here it is got some more
little dots to uh to give you more heat uh more surface area to dissipate heat
and then around here at the back as well so this cooler is just a monster and
like I I swear when I first picked up the card I I was I I was just floored at
how heavy it was I mean compared to a GTX 480 which is a heavy card with a big
cooler it's got four heat pipes uh five heat pipes sorry etc etc I mean this
weighs easily double like double you would never want to ship your system
with one of these installed no way no how along the lines of voltage tweaking
if you're doing actual voltage mods or if you want to check them um you can
actually use these contact points back here to check your video card voltages
for GPU 1 and GPU 2 so that's a pretty
cool feature we've seen this on motherboards in the past but it's very
very rare to see a feature like that where you can check your uh your video
card voltages with a multimeter so that's a pretty cool one as well and I
think we're getting pretty close to the end I mean I I guess I can say this will
install in a standard PCI Express 2.0
16x motherboard slot so that's something
to be aware of although I don't believe this meets PCI Express specifications
because of the power consumption let me just have a look at the box but I doubt
there's a PCIe logo anywhere on this box because the PCI Express standard calls
for only a certain amount of of power being pulled through the slot and
through the PCI Express connector so um
Yep this is one beefy card and it is not
uh not within the standards but that's the price you pay uh oh last thing in
terms of size so I showed the length I showed the height but I didn't show the
width so we've seen a couple cards in the last year or so that have been
released with triple slot coolers this
is one of them so this card will occupy
not only the slot with your connectors
but the slot with the vent as well as
the next one because you can see that the Shroud here takes up some space and
even the copper fins with the uh with the 8 mil heat pipes going through them
are a little bit too high for a dual
slot cooler so ASUS really wanted to emphasize Cooling and performance on
this not necessarily a compact size and
form factor so I think that covers pretty
much everything I wanted to say about the air and uh I hope that's everything that you
guys wanted to know I've had so many requests for an unboxing of this card
and thank you for checking out my video blog don't forget to
subscribe and uh here one last look so
heavy at the Aries cameraman inspired me to come in
and actually show you the weight difference between a GTX 480 so we're
going to go ahead and put that on our scale so GTX 480 weighs about 2 lb
this isn't the most accurate scale in the world but it should give you some idea so then we'll go ahead and put that
away and this is the
Aries 4.8 lb so this is a a true heavy weight
one of those graphic cards weighs more than two GTX
480s