ASUS MARS II
Hardware Award
RRP: $1,499 | Website: http://www.asus.com/Graphics_Cards/NVIDIA_Series/MARS_II2DIS3GD5/
Test Machine
• Intel Core i7 2600K
• Corsair Dominator GT 2000 8-98-24
• Intel 510 SSD 120GB
• ANTEC HCP 1200 PSU
• Windows 7 64-Bit
T
he Ultimate graphics card
is what ASUS is promising
with the MARS II. A limited
edition, specialist product
that is made for the gamer
who will spare no expense
at getting the ultimate
gaming performance. Most
ROG products are actually
targeted at the overclocker
but the MARS II is actually
for gamers, as we aren’t
sure how many competitive
overclockers will invest
$1,500 into a single graphics
card or any single product
for that matter. We took the
MARS II for a spin and these
were our findings.
24 The OverClocker Issue 17 | 2011
Analysis
The MARS II right of the
bat delivered incredible
performance. We have never
tested any graphics card
with this much power and
even the ASUS ARES pales
in comparison. As mentioned
earlier we stuck mainly to
the gaming benchmarks
as there really isn’t an
incentive for any competitive
overclocker to purchase such
a graphics card, the numbers
are just staggering and it
is indeed a juggernaut of a
graphics card. Compared to
the fastest single GTX 580
card we have tested (The
SuperOverclock GTX 580) the
MARS II delivers nearly twice
the power and compared to
reference model GTX580s
it actually is twice the
performance. That is some
incredible scaling right there.
It is also worth keeping in
mind that we did not test this
card with the latest 285.62
WHQL drivers which increase
SLI performance by some
margin so if you will; think of
these numbers as the worst
case scenario on a similarly
configured machine. With that
said a 4GHZ 2600K machine
actually isn?? ?t enough to drive
this card to its limits and a
clock speed approaching
4.5GHz would be a better
match. We however kept
our CPU clock speed low for
consistency.
In 3DMark Vantage,
the MARS is once again
scoring in the region of
10,000 points higher than
a reference GTX 580. As
impressive as this may
be, we were dealing with
serious CPU limitations and
with some tuning one can
expect scores significantly
higher than the ones we