Like any reasonable person, I found myself thinking, you know, the GeForce RTX 5090 is just too darn
affordable. Won't somebody please find a way to make it more expensive without adding any performance?
Oh, praise me! ASUS has answered my call! The ROG Astral 5090 Dehab Edition is exactly what it says
on the tin. A top-of-the-line RTX 5090 GPU, which is already going to run you $3,000 to $4,000
after scalper markup, but with 6.5 grams of .999 fineness gold and Arab-inspired motifs embedded
on its giant four-fan cooler. Well, you might say, maybe it's not that ridiculous. I mean,
gold seems like a perfectly cromulent investment in these turbulent times. How much more could it
cost, Michael? $10? Oh no, my friends, for the approximately 675 US dollars worth of gold on
this thing, you will pay, or rather I should say, I have paid anywhere from about four to five
thousand dollars more for this hyper-exclusive piece of gaming bling. This thing better knock
my socks off. After a word from the sucker who helped me pay for it.
The aptly named 5090 Dehab or Gold Edition is exclusive to the Middle Eastern North Africa region
and is meant to pay homage to the growing ROG customer base there. So how did I get my hands
on it? I'm in Canada. Well, okay, normally I am, but today I'm in Taiwan and after sending
a message to my incredulous ASUS contact saying that I wanted to buy one, they put me in touch
with a contact who hand-carried this from Saudi Arabia to the show floor for me to purchase.
The only question was, how do I get it safely off the show floor to unbox it? The retail prices
we've seen for this monster are anywhere from seven thousand to ten thousand US dollars.
I paid about eight thousand for mine, which feels completely unhinged, like surely this card is just
some kind of bizarre publicity stunt, right? Well, shockingly, it's not. While ASUS has never
publicly stated how many of these limited edition cards were made, they told me that it is apparently
five hundred, which turns this science fair project into four million dollars of potential
revenue. That is a lot more than I expected. I guess in the first draft of the script before I
heard back from ASUS was anywhere from five to fifty, but I don't know, maybe I shouldn't be
that surprised. It's not like this is that new. ASUS has done extreme limited run GPUs in the past.
The Mars 2, for instance, was a dual GPU overclocked card that had no power limit,
and they did about a thousand of those at fifteen hundred US dollars over ten years ago,
you know, before regular GPUs were fifteen hundred dollars. And the Middle Eastern market,
where this GPU is apparently selling quite well, is much bigger than it used to be.
Surely they can find five hundred rich gamers, then, to shell out for one.
Or four hundred and ninety-nine, since I've got one of them. Let's take a look.
Gotta give ASUS credit. They know how to present.
Ah, yes. Thank you.
How about thank you very much for this one, all right?
How to install. I dropped the one thing that mattered. Certificate of authenticity.
What is it? It's a fridge magnet. I don't know what I was expecting, but fridge magnet wasn't it?
Quad PCIe 2 12 volt 2 by 6 adapter and gold themed GPU support.
Oh, whoa, oh, oh, oh, it's magnetic. And it's got a little screwdriver on the end.
Finally, a thick boy cable tie and one of those adorable little PCB rulers. Gold themed, of course.
At this point, this probably feels like five play though. Let's hurry up and oh, oh, oh, oh, my.
Oh, it stinks. What the heck? James, come here. Oh, whoa. You see? Got that good manufacturing
stank. Everything is gold! The attention to detail is like I don't think I've ever
seen from these guys before. Even the IO plate is painted gold. There are a few
details that ASUS points out in their product story for this card that I have
to confess now that I have it in my hands I'm finding a little bit confusing. First of all they say that they chose the color gold to symbolize
its rarity, it's limited edition, and also because it's the color of sand which
is where the Middle East started in the desert. And then so that's the idea
behind this etched graphic that they have on the back where you've got buddy
with his camels and then something and then giant skyscrapers to show the
progress in the region from the desert to the sky. The fan hubs are apparently
covered in ancient Arabic characters and apparently there's handwritten Arabic
calligraphy somewhere that says unity courage and strength but I'm not sure
where it is. I don't read Arabic. One little detail they don't point out in the
product story is that there's coordinates on here. Hey James it's the
ASUS building in Taipei. As for why ASUS chose their astral design for the
Dehab Edition, well I think that's pretty obvious. It has their sick new vapor
chamber that has those recesses for heat pipes. It's got their dual fan blow-through
design on the back here, total of four fans, enhanced power delivery that made
it Slave's card of choice for extreme overclocking, and of course it looks sick.
All I need to do now is build a PC that is worthy of my new GPU. But wait a
tick, it looks cool but we don't actually know if it works and I should
probably find a test bench before I leave the country with it. I have no idea
what my warranty coverage is gonna look like for some card that I obtained in
Asia but was intended for sale in the Middle East and I'm taking to North
America. Where am I gonna get a computer? Where better to find a system than the
G-Skill booth? I need to hook up way. Actually that's very nice but no not
that. I have a GPU. Can you get me a test bench where I can stress test it?
Of course. Okay where do you want to put it on? Where are you going with that?
Where are you going with that? Yeah why not that one? Why not? I mean this clearly
needs an upgrade. Yeah of course of course. I don't ask for much right? This is
sick. DDR5, Cam2. Nice! Nice! We found a new power supply from our friends over
it. Don't worry it's fine it's all good. This is their Prime 1300 watt.
Here we go boys. Wait wait this is all wrong. Well I don't have any crystal
golden memory on there. Oh right yes. I love bugging these guys but I got to admit
it kind of gets me thinking. What kind of PC do you put a GPU like this in? Like
look it looks completely out of place in here. Hey there it is. That's more like
it. Try it in Z5 Royal Neo. Get this get this non-gold stuff out of here.
Disgusting. Okay there we go. I'll put it. I'm gonna put it there. Yeah! Oh yeah I
never mentioned the IO. It has five ports. Two HDMI, three display ports. Neat. Hey it
works! So far. Realistically G-skills favorite game is make RAM number go up
really high so I didn't expect them to have any actual game files but what they
do have is Furmark so we can go ahead and make sure this bad boy works. Hey fans
are spinning. 100% usage power 600 watts. It can't be 600 watts exactly can it?
They got to have hardware info on here. Oh yeah they do. According to 8 of 64 we
are at 598.67 watts 52.91 amps. Doesn't smell like burning. Definitely feels like
600 watts so it works which means the only question now is what do I do with
it? I could do an all-gold PC maybe. I could scalp it. Oh guys I'm kidding I'm
kidding but what I never cared about is our sponsor. If you guys enjoyed this
video why don't we throw back to that time I unboxed the Mars 2 one of their
previous weirdo limited edition GPUs.