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ASUS Mars II review -
Product Showcase
Posted by on: 09/22/2011 01:00 PM [ 0 comment(s) ]
The Mars II comes with four display connectors, two dual-link DVI, one HDMI and one DisplayPort connector. One card will get you more then sufficient performance to play your games on with three monitors connected.
We still receive this question a lot, but dual-link DVI does not mean you can hook up two monitors to one connector. Dual-link means double the signal not double the monitors, that way monitor resolutions over 1920x1200 can be supported. So dual-link DVI means it supports high-resolution or high-refresh rate monitors.
On the backside we see something interesting, a huge aluminum back plate protecting and cooling down the memory ICs. The card itself has a triple-slot solution and the cooling is once again DirectCU based, in fact the card remains quite silent which was a pleasant surprise alright. If you focus on the right top side you can see one SLI connector, yup -- as stated SLI is supported.
So yeah, drop 2600 EUR and go for four GPUs *coughs* there's goes my 2nd kidney.
Get this, you need to feed 21 power phases and want some room left for overclocking right?. Well, you need to connect three, that's right, three 8-pin PCIe graphics PEG connectors. So you'll be requiring a beefy power supply alright. Two 6 to 8-pin converters are supplied in the package though, there you use two 6-pin connectors and transform it into on 8-pin 12V voltage rail.
The little red button then, press it and the two 120mm fans will spin at 100% RPM. Handy during an overclocking session. The downside at 100%, noise... lots of it! It will keep the card under 60 degrees C though at full load!
ASUS Mars II review
We've seen the original brutal Mars, the exemplary ARES but ASUS is at it again with the all new Mars II, yep that's right. The x-factor products makes it prodigal return to manage a little bump and grinding. Money aside, the dual-GPU product tested today is uber cool though. It's the stuff that make my digitized ticker go tick a little faster -- and once you have it in your hands, you'll make a nervous giggle. Ah well, talk is cheap, have a look and then we'll head onwards into the review of the Lucifer of graphics cards.
ASUS MARS review
If you have been living under a rock and don't know what the ASUS Mars is .. let me give you an easy breakdown. You take two GeForce GTX 285 graphics cards, stick 4 GB of memory on there (2GB per GPU), sandwich them, SLI them up, market it as MARS, slap a limited edition label on there and make only a 1000 units. That in a nutshell is the product we'll be testing today. So without making a long and boring introduction, let's pop one of these little frackers into our finest test system and see where it ends up performance wise .. will this really be the fastest graphics card in the world anno September 2009 ?
We've seen the original brutal Mars, the exemplary ARES but ASUS is at it again with the all new Mars II, yep that's right. The x-factor products makes it prodigal return to manage a little bump and grinding. Money aside, the dual-GPU product tested today is uber cool though. It's the stuff that make my digitized ticker go tick a little faster -- and once you have it in your hands, you'll make a nervous giggle. Ah well, talk is cheap, have a look and then we'll head onwards into the review of the Lucifer of graphics cards.
ASUS MARS review
If you have been living under a rock and don't know what the ASUS Mars is .. let me give you an easy breakdown. You take two GeForce GTX 285 graphics cards, stick 4 GB of memory on there (2GB per GPU), sandwich them, SLI them up, market it as MARS, slap a limited edition label on there and make only a 1000 units. That in a nutshell is the product we'll be testing today. So without making a long and boring introduction, let's pop one of these little frackers into our finest test system and see where it ends up performance wise .. will this really be the fastest graphics card in the world anno September 2009 ?