14 DAY TRIAL // From this point on, it shouldn't take Asus to long to released the Mars II, but for those of you eager to see how well this beast of a graphics card performs in the real world a hardware review Website just took a sneak peak at this dual GTX 580 solution, complete with benchmarks.
As many of you probably know by now, the Mars II is based on a custom Asus design and it includes a pair of Nvidia GTX 580 cores linked together via SLI to provide impressive graphics performance.
Even more impressive is the fact that the two GF110 GPUs installed in the Mars II are clocked above Nvidia's reference frequency for single GTX 580 solutions, as they work at 782MHz.
This makes them a full 175MHz faster than Nvidia's dual-GF110 graphics card, the GTX 590, while the 3GB of GDDR5 video buffer are clocked at 1002MHz (4008MHz) data rate.
In order to allow for such high clock speeds to be reached, Asus had to pair the Mars II with a massive cooling assembly that occupies no less than three slots inside the system's case.
Removing the red and black metal shroud and the two 120mm fans covering the card reveals two separate aluminum heatsinks that each rely on four copper heatpipes to draw the heat away from the GF110 cores.
Power to the GTX 580 GPUs is delivered by a 20 phase VRM which is linked to three 8-pin PCI Express connectors.
Just like every other ROG series product launched by Asus, the Mars II also includes a variety of overclocking options, including a special button that is used increase the fan speed to 100%, and 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.
The Asus ROG Mars II will be released as a limited edition product and Asus will build only 1000 such graphics cards. Pricing is set at $1000 US. (via VR-Zone)
