Introduction

First seen at Computex this year, ASUS today released their long awaited ASUS MARS II. The MARS II is the first dual GeForce GTX 580 card, and is part of ASUS Republic of Gamers (ROG) brand of premium products targeting the gamer-overclocker market. Please note that ASUS did not choose the "GeForce GTX 590" name, even though the ASUS MARS II is a dual-GPU design. Rather they went with calling it Dual GeForce GTX 580, which makes sense since the MARS II comes at the full GeForce GTX 580 clock speeds. instead of the reduced clocked of the GTX 590.



ASUS has also added another significant change to the MARS II: Unlike the GTX 590, the card does not use any power limiting system. While this means higher performance, it also means increased power and thermal requirements for the ASUS MARS II. To take care of this, ASUS has designed a 21 phase power circuitry which is almost twice as powerful as the 11 phases of the GTX 590. To take care of the heat the ASUS MARS II uses a triple slot Direct CU cooler with two fans.

In terms of pricing the limited edition ASUS MARS II is the most expensive single graphics card released so far. Prices are expected to be around $1499 online!

Packaging

Contents

You will receive:

• Graphics card
• Driver CD + Documentation
• SLI Bridge
• DVI to Analog VGA Adapter
• 2x PCIe Power Cable
• Limited Edition Certificate
• ASUS ROG Case Badge
• 2x Foam Spacer

The Card

The MARS II is a huge and heavy card with over 2.5 kilograms. Its footprint extends well beyond what we have seen on more traditional cards - make sure you have a case that can fit this monster.


The card requires three slots in your system.


Display connectivity is two DVI ports, one full size HDMI port and one full size DisplayPort output. Due to NVIDIA's display output logic design you are limited to two active displays at any time. AMD GPUs have a more flexible configuration and allow up to six active outputs at the same time.

An HDMI sound device is included in the GPU, too. It is HDMI 1.4a compatible which includes 7.1 channel HD audio and support for Blu-ray 3D movies. The DisplayPort interface is DisplayPort 1.2 compliant which allows the use of a DisplayPort hub to connect multiple monitors, or daisy chain them together.


You may combine two ASUS MARS II cards in SLI for even more performance.


Pictured above are photos of the front and back, showing the disassembled board. High-res versions are also available (front, back). If you choose to use these images for voltmods etc, please include a link back to this site or let us post your article.