Gadgetory

welcome to my unboxing and first look at the Asus Ares 2 you can see I have an entire master carton of Ares 2's which is 5 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 Ares two's every Ares 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 Ares 2 is actually the entire size of the inside of this outer packing carton in fact it I guess it's possible that a Seuss 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 a soos 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 13 percent faster than gtx 690 130 percent faster than HD 7970 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 set up 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 10 50 megahertz base so that's over 1 gigahertz base and they boost at one point one gigahertz memory clock is six thousand six hundred megahertz memory interface is 768 bit ok ok 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 a suit doesn't act they 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 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 here's your hinges on the back it's got feet on the bottom so you could transport the card 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 ok 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 rat we find ah the numbered card telling you exactly which areas you get this document sort of certifies that the limited edition is a unique order 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 going to flip this bad boy up a little bit 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 ace attack LC LC 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 cards 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 all so 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 300 dual 6 pin PCI e2 8 pin PCIe adapters and we'll show you why you need that in just a moment here and finally the card itself the Ares 2 so 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 volted in any way they're just Bend 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 3/8 pin power connectors which is actually not unprecedented we've seen cards that do this before so if you wanted to install to Ares 2 cards you would need to make sure that you have to 120 millimeter mounting points in range of your GPU slots of your PCI Express slots you need to make sure you have six PCI Express 8 pin connectors this is a pcie 3.0 16 X card as you'd probably expect 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 yes here we go I don't want like I don't want to put fingerprints on it or anything so I'm going to be careful to 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 a 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 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 ACR AMD tried to build a 79 70 X 2 you know dual dual GPU card and wasn't able to pull it off so like it's and that would have been to sell a lot more than a thousand units so a sous 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 going to 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 79 70 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 Ares 2 so the Ares 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 Ares card that hasn't required three empty slots for case compatibility alright we're going to wrap up with one more thing and that is the i/o at the back so we sue 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 Ares 2 from Asus don't forget to subscribe to 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