ASUS has released the latest monster card in the form of Mars II and with dual GF110 GPus and a price tag over 1200€ it is something out of the ordinary. The graphics card looks like the fastest on the market, but also has a dark side, where the card is capable of consuming over 700 watt in extreme situations.
ASUS Mars II will only be made in 999 copies and the card can almost be described as two GeForce GTX 580 cards welded together. The card is like NVIDIA GeForce GTX 590 equipped with dual GF110 GPUs with 512 CUDA cores, but the clock frequencies are considerably higher, actually even higher than the single-GPU card GeForce GTX 580. ASUS Mars II will be clocked at 781 MHz, which can be compared to 772 MHz on the GTX 580 GPU, or 607 MHz on the two circuits of GTX 590. The card will get dual memory buses with a total of 3GB memory clocked at 4 008 MHz, the same as GeForce GTX 580.
| Model | GTX 570 | GTX 580 | GTX 590 | ASUS MARS II |
| Graphics core | GF110 | GF110 | GF110 | GF110 |
| CUDA cores | 480 | 512 | 2 x 512 | 2 x 512 |
| Clock frequency | 732 MHz | 772 MHz | 607 MHz | 781 MHz |
| Shader frequency | 1464 MHz | 1544 MHz | 1414 MHz | 1544 MHz |
| Memory bus | 320-bit | 384-bit | 2 x 384-bit | 2 x 384-bit |
| Memory frequency | 3600 MHz | 4008 MHz | 3414 MHz | 4008 MHz |
| Memory Bandwidth | 152 GB/s | 192 GB/s | 327.7 GB/s | 384 GB/s |
| Memory buffer | 1,25 – 2,5 GB | 1,5 – 3 GB | 3 GB | 3GB |
| TDP | 225W | 244W | 365W | ??? |
The card has a monstrous 21 phase power supply and three 8-pin power connectors, which is enough to kill many power supplies. According to tests by TechPowerUp! the card by itself can consume up to 729 watt, which is over 300 watt more than the 404 watt for HD 6990, the number two. Luckily the average was only 458 watt, once again only for the graphics card and no other components involved.
ASUS Mars II is without a doubt the new performance king and the reviews published so far makes this very obvious. The massive cooler and the physical size of the card is nearly as unique as the performance and energy consumption. But when the price tag is over 1200€ it really does make the card stand out. Perhaps not even something for the hardcore Crysis gamers, but a card that really tickles our senses as enthusiasts.
