Look, I wouldn't blame you if you looked at the Asus ROG Astral RTX 5090 Dhabab Edition and thought, hmm, I'm not sure it's worth remortgaging the house for. The Middle East-only card was briefly available for around $7,000, although prices have fluctuated since then and I've seen the odd second-hand model float around for way more than that.
The good news is, the Asus ROG Astral RTX 5080 Dhabab Core is much more affordable. Videocardz has spotted one at a Dubai-based retailer for $2,589, and given it's covered in 24-carat gold plating, I'd say that was something of a bargain.
I'm kidding, of course. It's the same sort of money as you'll pay for a regular, non-gold-plated RTX 5090, and that's a card that'll give an RTX 5080 a thorough kicking. Mind you, it's not like the regular second-tier Nvidia card is cheap at the moment, as we've been struggling to find them for anything less than $1,100 on our cheap graphics card deals page.
Still, let's look at the specs together and wonder, shall we? Dhabab means gold in Arabic, and so as a result this quad-fan card is covered in 6.5 grams of the shiny stuff, which is worth around $700 at today's prices alone. It's also got premium MOSFETs, Asus' patented vapor chamber cooler design, and a protective PCB coating underneath all that shiny metal. All of which is, as far as I'm aware, the same as Asus' other ROG Astral cards.
So, a $1,000+ graphics card, plus $700 worth of gold equals... well, the maths doesn't quite add up, I agree. Still, Asus has to go to all the effort of gold plating these things, and I think it's aiming for a market of high-rollers that really don't mind paying over the odds for an object of desire, providing it's somewhat unique.
Think of these cards as the GPU-equivalent of superyachts. Sure, they technically serve a practical purpose, but I reckon the show-off factor is really the USP here. And let's face it, showy this card is, from all angles.
You could also argue it's more than a little tasteless.
Still, I'd be lying if I said I didn't want either of these gold-dripping beasties in my machine, just for the pure excess factor of owning one, and that's the point. It's PC hardware bling, and in all honesty, I can kinda stand behind that. Those of us that can't afford a card like this have a tendency to deck out our rigs in glowing RGB lights, and really, what's the difference?
Well, thousand's of dollars, naturally. Anyway, it's shiny, its expensive, and I'll probably never see one in the wild. Unless someone out there is a particular fan of my writing and wants to get me a wonderful holiday gift, in which case my address is... ah, y'know what, forget it. No golden GPU is quite worth that.
