 Welcome to my unboxing and first look at the Asus Aries II. You can see I have an entire master carton of Aries II's 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 II's. Every Aries II 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 II is actually the entire size of the inside of this outer packing carton. 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 and transit. So let's go ahead and have a look at what Asus has to say for themselves really briefly. The Asus II features a custom cooler with liquid dissipation and air cooling. So we'll show you this once we open it up. 13% faster than GTX 690, 130% faster than HT7970 and we'll explain why that would be. And one card, six displays with six gigabytes of GDDR5 and a three-year limited warranty on this guy. Alright let's go ahead and 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. Alright general specs so they are both 7970 gigahertz edition GPUs. It is a dual GPU card. They are clocked at 1050 megahertz base so that's over 1 gigahertz base and they boost at 1.1 gigahertz. Memory clock is 6600 megahertz. Memory interface is 768 bit. Okay, okay Asus 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 2560 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 box inside the box. See look you can stack them all like this and then we're gonna 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. 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 at the very least this case will be reusable for you once you are finished installing the Ares 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 hand and cut to the exact shape to match the Ares 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. Inside you find an additional fan for the radiator. We're going to talk more about the hybrid cooling solution soon. You find mounting screws for the radiator. Those bolt through the fan through your case and into the rad. We find the numbered card telling you exactly which Ares you get. This document certifies that the limited edition is a unique radar 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 gonna flip this bad boy up a little bit. 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 Asetek LCLC with a thick 120 millimeter radiator. So as long as your case has support for a single 120 mil rad you can install the Ares 2 assuming you don't already have a radiator mounted to that point. It comes with a push-pull fan design. So 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' 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 as well as any other diagnostics you'd 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 inside we also find sort of you know whatever who cares 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, an Asus ROG case badge, very very cool, silica gel do not eat, three dual six-pin PCIe to eight-pin PCIe adapters and we'll show you why you need that in just a moment here and finally the card itself the Aries 2. So then 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 gigahertz editions unlike regular dual GPU cards they are not down clocked or under voltage in any way they're just binned 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 millimeter cooling fan on the card itself because the water so you can 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 yeah yeah so out this way over here cooling everything that it needs to on the actual PCB so it requires three eight pin power connectors 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 millimeter mounting points in range of your GPU slots of your PCI Express slots you'd need to make sure you have six PCI Express eight pin connectors this is a PCIe 3.0 16x card as you'd probably expect in order to get the bandwidth that 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 yes here we go I don't want to like I don't want to put fingerprints on it or anything so I'm gonna be careful then 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 gonna make the it's not like you're gonna 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 ACR 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 thousand 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 backplate 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 gonna leave fingerprints on it and it could potentially stain it and slick saying something 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 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 gonna 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 display port 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 Linus Tech Tips for more unboxings reviews and other computer videos