Introduction

The GeForce GTX 760 has been on the market for a while and has established itself as a solid upper- midrange graphics card. The card is based on the same 28 nm GK104 silicon as the GeForce GTX 680, but only features six of the chip's eight streaming multiprocessors, which translates into a configuration with 1,152 CUDA cores and 96 texture memory units (TMUs). Unlike the GTX 660 Ti, NVIDIA left the memory and raster operations subsystems untouched, giving the chip a 256-bit wide GDDR5 memory interface and 32 ROPs.

The chip features NVIDA's new GPU Boost 2.0 technology, which takes temperature, power, and load into account. Opportunities for the GPU to run boost frequencies at load are greater if the GPU is cool (under the 80°C mark) and therein lies the incentive to opt for custom-design graphics cards with competent cooling solutions. The memory is clocked at 6 Gbps, which yields a decent memory bandwidth of 192 GB/s, a 33 percent increase over the GTX 660 Ti and GTX 660.



ASUS carved a completely new, unique product out of this successful GTX 760 foundation: the ROG MARS GTX 760. It is based on two GTX 760 GPUs on one graphics card running in SLI, connected through a PLX PEX8747 PCI-Express gen 3.0 bridge chip on the card. All major specs, like shaders, memory size, bus width, etc., have effectively been doubled due to the use of two graphics processors.

The card is priced at a seemingly steep $630, which is significantly more expensive than buying two separate GTX 760 cards for $470. The ASUS MARS GTX 760 is only $70 cheaper than NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 780 Ti flagship.