ASUS Ares ATI Radeon 5870 X2 Limited Edition Graphics Card Unboxing & First Look Linus Tech Tips
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2011-05-08
·
2,116 words · ~10 min read
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by popular demand we are finally going to be taking a look at the ASUS Aries
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limited edition graphics card so only a th000 of these were produced worldwide
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and this is the box like seriously that
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is the box for One graphics card it's
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like it looks like it could contain a good siiz gaming notebook anyway we've
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already taken the Aries uh briefcase out
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of the box and this is what it looks
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like so if you buy Aries you will get something that looks like this it looks
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like a briefcase full of money it has a little Aries logo on it right
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here and it is lockable so uh if you're
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transporting your video card and it's not inside your system you there's
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actually combination locks right here so you can set two separate combinations
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one for each side uh they're they're set to Zero by default so that you can
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actually get it open it comes with a little booklet attached to the outside
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that says uh birth of a legend uh talks
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about the the packaging that they've uh
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that they've used on this particular product to make it really stand out
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makings of a beast so they're saying it's going to
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outperform even the radon 5970 by over
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32% so what the Aries does is instead of
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using two cut down 5870 cores it uses
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two complete 5870 cores a fully custom
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cooler and we're going to have a really close look at the cooler it's just um
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outstanding and Incredibly heavy and um
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that is how the aies achieves this
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fastest single graphics card
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performance ever Benchmark that it does
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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
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six pin dual six pin to single 8 Pin
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adapters because this this card
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requires a lot of power connectors next
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we've got a DVI to HDMI
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adapter okay then we have a little Republic of Gamers case badge that you
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can put on your case and finally we have
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an ASUS Republic of Gamers gaming
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mouse it's a laser mouse we can tell cuz it says class one laser product on the
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bottom all right it's pretty straightforward looking you got your Mouse wheel you got two side buttons
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here you got a nice little rubberized grip DPI switch anyway we are not here
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to see the mouse we are here to see the graphics card king of all graphics cards
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right now oh there's a couple more things holy cow it's heavy okay button
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functions uh oh okay so there's a manual for the mouse uh there's a driver for
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the mouse uh here's a little quick start guide and here's how to operate the
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combination locks there you go as well as a VGA driver and manual don't use
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that download the latest drivers if you're not downloading the latest
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drivers for a card like this uh you should probably be smacked
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because yeah you just should that's just
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how it works okay so we'll put those back in there and let's have a look at
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the Aries so the first thing you should probably notice about this card it is is
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it is longer taller and wider than most other
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graphics cards on the market right now in terms of outputs we've got our usual
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suspects for uh uh for Ati ifinity so we
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have there goes a car alarm of all things we better just pause this for now
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and we're back sorry about that so we have two DVI HDMI so that means you can
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hook up two normal DVI monitors just using an adapter here and then we have
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one DisplayPort Port so will you need to use an active adapter or a display
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port monitor in in order to run three display off this graphics card we've got
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an empty slot here so that some of the cooling uh capability of this cooler is
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going to be blown out the back and the battery ran out so we're going to try
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this one more time we talked about the connectors we talked about how some of
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the heat is going to be exhausted from the back let's talk about this cooler a
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little bit because the cooler on the Aries is
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completely 100% custom so it starts in
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the Middle with a 100 mm fan now this is
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not your average VGA fan solution it
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uses an extremely thick fan for high
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static pressure so you can see how forward swep these blades are and how
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deep they go compared to a typical VGA fan and what it needs that for is in
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order to push air through these dense
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copper fin Arrangements that are each
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okay each containing not only the copper
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fin structure but four 8 mm heat pipes
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so there's one of these coolers on each of the 5870 cores on this graphics card
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so like I said before it is more like a
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5870 X2 and not like a 5970 because a
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5970 has two gpus that are kind of like
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either a cut down 5870 or a beefed up
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5850 it's somewhere in between no these are true 5870 cores and as such they
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have power requirements that go a little bit beyond what you'd find with a
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typical dual graphics card solution so this card takes one six pin PCIe
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connector and two 8 Pin PCI connectors
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to run just one Aries card in your computer ASUS recommends a 750w power
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supply with 40 amps on the 12volt rail that's to run one I mean if you're even
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going to have uh three PCI Express connectors you better have um a dual
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graphics card ready power supply in the first place on the back of the card
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let's have a look at the cooling once again this is a thick aluminum plate
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that has little uh ribs in it to get a little bit better heat dissipation but
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basically you can see this is incredibly thick compared to the back plates that
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we typically see on a graphics card and the reason for that is that it has to
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cool the memory that is located on the back of the card so this card has 4 gigs
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of memory compared to this the normal 2
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gigs on a 5970 so that gives you double
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the frame buffer now in terms of other features to
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talk about oh yeah uh so I mentioned that it was that it was longer uh wider
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and taller than most graphics cards so here just for comparison I have another
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uh fairly beefy graphics card with a a fairly legit looking cooler on it this
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is a GTX 480 and I just want to do a
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quick size comparison so I'm going to go ahead and put down the Aries right
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here and I just want to show show you how big this graphics card is compared
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to a typical one so that is a standard height graphics
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card so you can see that the crossfire connector is located a good inch higher
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than the PCI Express or PCI back plate right here that means that this card is
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significantly taller than most other graphics cards on the mark in fact
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almost all leather graphics cards on the market even with the heat pipes on the
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GTX 480 that can cause clearance issues with some cases it's significantly
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shorter than the Aries now that's
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something that you really want to be aware of if you want to install one of these cards you got to make sure that
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your case is going to have enough room for this graphics card another cool
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feature I wanted to show you ASUS does support through software uh voltage
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tweaking on this card so they're saying that you can get dramatically better
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performance when you overclock the Aries and this thing is designed from the
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ground up to just pump voltage through it to overclock the snot out of it
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because if you're buying the ultimate graphics card you better be getting the
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ultimate performance so you can see not only on the back but also on the front
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we've got huge aluminum plates that
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cover all of the heat producing components other than the gpus and the
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voltage regulation here which is covered by copper so you can see it goes down
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there under the fan as well you've got that ribbed aluminum heat sink and then
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it comes all the way around see up here on the top here it is got some more
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little dots to uh to give you more heat uh more surface area to dissipate heat
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and then around here at the back as well so this cooler is just a monster and
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like I I swear when I first picked up the card I I was I I was just floored at
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how heavy it was I mean compared to a GTX 480 which is a heavy card with a big
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cooler it's got four heat pipes uh five heat pipes sorry etc etc I mean this
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weighs easily double like double you would never want to ship your system
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with one of these installed no way no how along the lines of voltage tweaking
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if you're doing actual voltage mods or if you want to check them um you can
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actually use these contact points back here to check your video card voltages
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for GPU 1 and GPU 2 so that's a pretty
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cool feature we've seen this on motherboards in the past but it's very
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very rare to see a feature like that where you can check your uh your video
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card voltages with a multimeter so that's a pretty cool one as well and I
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think we're getting pretty close to the end I mean I I guess I can say this will
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install in a standard PCI Express 2.0
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16x motherboard slot so that's something
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to be aware of although I don't believe this meets PCI Express specifications
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because of the power consumption let me just have a look at the box but I doubt
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there's a PCIe logo anywhere on this box because the PCI Express standard calls
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for only a certain amount of of power being pulled through the slot and
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through the PCI Express connector so um
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Yep this is one beefy card and it is not
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uh not within the standards but that's the price you pay uh oh last thing in
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terms of size so I showed the length I showed the height but I didn't show the
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width so we've seen a couple cards in the last year or so that have been
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released with triple slot coolers this
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is one of them so this card will occupy
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not only the slot with your connectors
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but the slot with the vent as well as
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the next one because you can see that the Shroud here takes up some space and
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even the copper fins with the uh with the 8 mil heat pipes going through them
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are a little bit too high for a dual
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slot cooler so ASUS really wanted to emphasize Cooling and performance on
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this not necessarily a compact size and
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form factor so I think that covers pretty
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much everything I wanted to say about the air and uh I hope that's everything that you
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guys wanted to know I've had so many requests for an unboxing of this card
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and thank you for checking out my video blog don't forget to
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subscribe and uh here one last look so
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heavy at the Aries cameraman inspired me to come in
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and actually show you the weight difference between a GTX 480 so we're
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going to go ahead and put that on our scale so GTX 480 weighs about 2 lb
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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
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away and this is the
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Aries 4.8 lb so this is a a true heavy weight
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one of those graphic cards weighs more than two GTX
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480s