Asus says this card is a celebration of a few things. For starters, Doom: The Dark Ages coming out—that's a given—but also it's been 30 years since the company started making GPUs. Ain't that neat, the company is nearly as old as Doomguy.
"It is also the 30th anniversary for our graphics card division this year, and we've got a lot in store to celebrate," says Sharon Chang, Asus, at an event at the company's HQ.
"One of the milestones for our celebration is a collab with the developers of Doom."
That's a good enough reason as any, I suppose. Onto the card and I have to say I wasn't overwhelmed by the renders presented on-screen at Asus' Computex 2025 event. However, I got to see this thing in-person later in the day and damn, this thing is pretty cheeky.
The backplate is your standard Doomguy slaughtering hoards of nasties, and the two-tone gold and green effect on the rear fan (the Astral has four fans FYI) is carried over to one on the front too.
There's some slick lighting down the edge, which looks superb when set to bathe the card and other components in a warm red. Blood red, presumably.
Catch up with Computex 2025: We're stalking the halls of Taiwan's biggest tech show once again to see what Nvidia, AMD, Intel, Asus, Gigabyte, MSI and more have to offer.
Yeah, it's one helluva card, but there is a slight catch. Firstly, Asus is only making 666 of these bad boys, and secondly, you have to pre-order it for the grand total of $2,000 over at the Bethesda store. That's, uh, double the asking price of an RTX 5080. Technically you also get a T-shirt, copy of the game and premium content, whatever that means, an oversized mouse pad and a replica yellow keycard.
Asus put together a show rig with all Doom-inspired parts and case over at its Computex event, and damn does it look lovely. Yet would I part ways with $2,000 for this card alone? Hell no.
