welcome to my unboxing and first look at the ASUS Aries 2 you can see I have an
entire Master carton of Aries 2os which is five cards hence the size of this
enormous box on the table in front of me
actually I lied we do not have a master carton of Aries 2s every Aries 2 comes
in a box this big so we're going to strip off the outer Carton and we will
be back in just a moment now I was expecting some random
foam around a box but no the Aries 2 is
actually the entire size of the inside
of this outer packing cart in fact I guess it's possible that ASUS doesn't
even intend for retailers to put this
this shipping box on the Shelf it's probably more intended to be displayed
like this and that's just to protect the box from scuffs in transit so let's go
ahead and have a look at what ASUS has to say for themselves really briefly the
ASUS 2 features a custom cooler with liquid dissipation and air cooling so
we'll show you this once we open it up 133% faster than gtx690 130% faster than
hd7970 and we'll explain why that would be and one card six displays with 6 gab
of gddr5 and a three-year limited warranty on this guy all right let's go
ahead and uh yeah supports AMD Crossfire
so yes you could actually install two of them for a quad GPU setup if you wanted
so that would be 12 gigs of GPU memory in your system all right General specs
so they are both 7970 GHz Edition gpus
it is a dual GPU card they are clocked at 1050 MHz base so that's over 1 GHz
base and they boost at 1.1 GHz memory clock is
6,600 MHz memory interface is 768 bit
okay okay you don't actually get to do that the memory interface is going to be
half of that so they're doubling it because there's two gpus but maximum
digital resolution 256 okay none of this is relevant anymore let's go ahead and
open this bad boy up ASUS doesn't actually seal the box so I guess that
there's probably a reason for that so let's go ahead and okay yet another box
inside so give us a moment this is like one of those Russian
dolls with the uh the Box inside the box
inside see look you can stack them all like this and then we're going to find
something even crazier and even more impressive inside this guy so this looks
like a very high-end sort of you know
casing for what might be like a really cool you know gun inside I mean it's
kind of a weapon you know weapon for gaming or whatever else you want to do
it's uh here's your hinges on the back it's got feet on the bottom so you could
transport the cart around outside of your system if you really wanted to it
does lock so that the very least this case will be reusable for you once you
are finished installing the Aries 2 in your system feels like a collector's
item and is packaged like a collector's
item I cannot I cannot overstate how
expensive every last detail of this card is down to things like this packing foam
getting a custom foam like this this is hand assembled I hope you guys realize
that I know I harp on packaging a lot but look at this these pieces are
actually glued together by by hand and cut to the exact shape to match the
Aries 2 graphics card that is how this happens it's not magic there's no
machine that produces these that is the only way to produce custom foam like
this okay so inside you find an additional fan for the radiator so we're
going to talk more about the hybrid cooling solution soon you find mounting
screws for the radiator okay so those bolt through the
fan through your case and into the rad
we find ah the numbered card telling you
exactly which areas you get this document certifi certifies that the
limited edition is a unique R art designed by the aluminum plate is individually laser carved and
sequentially numbered to certify the limited edition status making it a
collector's item and then the card itself you know
what yeah here we go so this probably
looks pretty familiar guys here I'm just GNA flip this bad boy up a little bit Ah
good the back is protected okay there we go so put it down there so this probably
looks familiar this looks an awful lot like an acch lclc with a thick 120 mm
radiator so as long as your case has support for a single 120 mil rad you can
install the Aries too assuming you don't already have a radiator mounted to that
point it comes with a push pull fan design so uh it is looks like it is set
up by default to be installed in your case this way so as an exhaust so you
would hook up that additional fan here and plug both fans into the card
directly where it can actually be controlled using ASUS's GPU tweak
software see right there there's a harness that has one of the fans plugged
in already and the other fan is ready to be plugged in and that gives you control
over overclocking fan profiles uh as
well as any other Diagnostics you need to have about the card such as the
temperatures which I can tell you right now will be surprisingly low for a dual
GPU card okay uh inside we also find
sort of you know whatever who cares uh drivers and all that that you should
download the latest of also all the accessories that you'd expect including
a crossfire Bridge DVI to HDMI
adapter um and as seus Rog case badge
very very cool uh silica gel do not eat
uh three uh dual six pin PCIe to 8 Pin PCIe
adapters and we'll show you why you need that in just a moment here and finally
the card itself the Aries Tu so the
these liquid cooling tubes these quarter inch tubes actually cool the gpus so
there are two here we go two gpus on the
card one of them is here the other one is here those are both 79 full 7970 GHz
editions unlike regular dual GPU cards
they are are not downclocked or undervolted in any way they're just
bined for Extreme Performance and lower power consumption and they are used on
this PCB it has a unique 20 phase power
design which brings me to why there is still an 80 mm cooling fan on the card
itself because the water see you can't actually see into the cooler very well
but the water cools the gpus and this is responsible just for cooling the vrm
assembly as well as the memory itself so
it is you can actually kind of see it there so it's vented throughout the card
so that it is going to be pushing air down the channels where it's actually
needed see so pushing air out here down to the PCB of your motherboard out over
here where it can go through wherever it needs to go at least I think y yep so
out this way over here cooling everything that it needs to on the
actual PCB so it requires three 8 Pin
power connectors with which is actually not unprecedented we've seen cards that
do this before so if you wanted to install two Aries 2 cards you would need
to make sure that you have two 120 mm
mounting points in range of your GPU Slots of your PCI Express slots You'
need to make sure you have six PCI express8 pin connectors this is a PCIe
3.0 16x card as you'd probably expect um
in order to get the bandwidth it needs out of the slot up here you find one
crossfire finger so that gives you the ability to install up to two of these in
a system because you can have up to four GPU Crossfire so there's two gpus here
and then there'd be two on the other one so hence the one crossfire Bridge the uh
yes here we go I don't want to like I don't want to put fingerprints on it or
anything so I'm going to be careful with it you know we'll be back in a
moment so other things about this card that make it cost an absolute Fortune to
make the tooling and the design the machine work that goes into building a
like massive cooler like this I mean this this plate of aluminum at the time
of starting to cut into it with the machine had to be about this thick in
order to get the design that ASUS was going for you see the angles that
everything is cut at like you see how that that Mark goes in at an angle and
then on the other side there's straight cuts and then cuts that go in at an
angle as well that is just absolutely Precision
manufactured and when you're only building a thousand of these cards it's
not like you're going to make the uh it's not like you're going to make the money back in the volume that you're
selling or anything like that so the custom PCB the design that actually goes
into building something like this I mean as our AMD tried to build a
7970 X2 you know dual dual GPU card and
wasn't able to pull it off so you know
like it's and that would have been to sell a lot more than a th units so ASUS
put all that work into it just to sell a thousand plus again the custom PCB the
custom cooler the custom sort of everything that goes into it I didn't
want to take the cover off the back plate because it is brushed aluminum so
what I'd really recommend that folks who buy these do is install it in your
system then take the protective cover off because as soon as you touch that
aluminum it's going to leave fingerprints on it and it could potentially stain it and Slick saying
something gloves yeah or use gloves to install it making sure of course that
they're like not staticky gloves or anything like that so yeah remove before
use uh oh the sheer the sheer size of this card let's go retrieve something
else ah yes here's a 7970 so it's hard
to tell without another card for so this is already a big graphics card there it
is for comparison with an aries 2 so the Aries 2 is a full inch taller a full
inch longer than a single 7970 but the most impressive thing about
it perhaps is the fact that it is still only a dual slot card so you don't need
three slots this is the first Mars or Aries card that hasn't required three
empty slots for case compatibility all
right we're going to wrap up with one more thing and that is the io at the
back so ASUS says native six outputs and they mean it because you don't need any
air exhaust in order to cool the card because it's mostly liquid cooled ASUS
can have a full IO shield with four DisplayPort outs and two dual link DVI
outputs thank you for checking out my unboxing and first look at the Aries 2
from ASUS don't forget to subscribe to lineus Tech tips for more unboxings
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