 By popular demand we are finally going to be taking a look at the ASUS ARIES limited edition graphics card So only a thousand 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 sized gaming notebook Anyway, we've already taken the ARIES briefcase out of the box And this is what it looks like So if you buy an 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 if you're transporting your video card and it's not inside your system There's actually combination locks right here So you can set two separate combinations, one for each side 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 birth of a legend Talks about the packaging that they've used on this particular product to make it really stand out The makings of a beast So they're saying it's going to outperform even the Radeon 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 outstanding and incredibly heavy And that is how the ARIES achieves this fastest single graphics card performance ever benchmarked 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 6 pin, dual 6 pin Two single 8 pin adapters because 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 because it says class 1 laser product on the bottom Alright 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, oh okay so there's a manual for the mouse There's a driver for the mouse 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 you should probably be smacked Because yeah you just should that's just how it works Okay so 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 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 ATI affinity 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 display port port so you need to use an active adapter or a display port monitor In order to run three displays off this graphics card We've got an empty slot here so that some of the cooling capability of this cooler is going to be blown out the battery 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 100mm 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 swept 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 8mm 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 5870X2 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 6 pin PCIe connector and two 8 pin PCIe connectors To run just one Ares card in your computer Asus recommends a 750 watt power supply with 40 amps on the 12 volt rail That's to run one, I mean if you're even going to have three PCI Express connectors You better have 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 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 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 So I mentioned that it was longer, wider, and taller than most graphics cards So here just for comparison, I have another fairly beefy graphics card with 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 Ares right here And I just want to 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 backplate right here That means that this card is significantly taller than most other graphics cards on the market In fact, almost all other 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 Ares 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 voltage tweaking on this card So they're saying that you can get dramatically better performance when you overclock the Ares 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 give you 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 swear when I first picked up the card 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 5 heat pipes, 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 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 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 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 power being pulled through the slot and through the PCI Express connectors So yep, this is one beefy card and it is not within the standards but that's the price you pay 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 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 8mm 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 Aries and 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 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 I'm going to go ahead and put that on our scale So a GTX 480 weighs about 2 pounds, 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 pounds, so this is a true heavy weight One of those graphic cards weighs more than two GTX 480s