14 DAY TRIAL // Expected with great interest by a quite a few overclocking enthusiasts, Asus' dual GTX 580 Mars II seems to be getting ready for its official launch since the graphics card was recently listed on an Europen website, shorty after its first benchmarks made their appearance on the Web.
As many of you probably know, the Mars II is based on a custom design developed by Asus and the card will be available in limited quantities (only 1000 units will be built).
Its recommended price should be set at $1000 US, but Fudzilla reports this could end up costing even more since the first European listings to make their appearance range form €1260 to €1399.
For this much money, users will get a beast of a graphics card that relies on a massive three-slot cooler to keep the temperatures of the two GTX 580 GPUs working in SLI mode in check.
All the heat produced by the Mars II while running is dissipated by two high-performance 120mm fans which sit on top of a full length aluminum heatsink and these cool both the GF110 GPUs and the 21-phase VRM installed.
According to Asus, the setup is capable of delivering 15% better performance, 35 degrees Celsius cooler operation and 2.5 times longer lifespan than the reference GTX 590 design and enables the company to clock the two GPUs at 782MHz.
This makes the Mars II the fastest dual-GPU GF110 graphics card around, as it beats Nvidia's own implementation of a dual GTX 580 solution by 175MHz.
To deliver the massive amount of power required, Asus' Mars II has been fitted with three 8-pin PCI Express connectors which are placed right near a special button that is used to adjust the voltage and the fan speed to 100%.
The rest of the overclocking-oriented features are placed on the back of the PCB, in a so-called Zone MOD area, which can be used to turn off Nvidia's OCP, to enable a special LN2 mode or to tweak the board's PLL VMEM voltages.
About the same time that Fudzilla reported the Mars II has started to make its appearance into the European market, an Asus Singapore employee posted detailed pictures on what appears to be a retail version of the Mars II as well as a FurMark benchmark result of the card.
