ADATA brought some innovative storage products to the 2025 International CES. The XPG MARS 970 Storm is an M.2 NVMe Gen 5 SSD with a self-contained liquid cooling loop. Its construction involves a baseplate from which heat is conventionally transferred to a cylindrical heat dissipation surface—a sort of radiator, where a pair of tiny 20 mm fans push and pull air through, to keep the controller cool. Speaking of which, the drive is based on the Silicon Motion SM2508 flagship controller that's built on the TSMC 6 nm process. It comes in capacities of up to 8 TB. ADATA claims sequential transfer speeds of up to 14 GB/s reads, with up to 12 GB/s writes.

You can have this drive without this cooling solution (eg: if you have a nice one of your own from your motherboard). It's called the MARS 970 Blade. It can be used without a cooler, but performance will be lesser. ADATA hence advertises sequential speeds of up to 12 GB/s reads, with up to 10 GB/s writes. The MARS 970 Blade strangely only comes in capacities of up to 4 TB—there's no 8 TB variant.

Cougar today expanded its gaming furniture lineup with the MARS 120 ARGB compact gaming desk. A variant of the original Cougar MARS, the MARS 120 gets its name from the 120 cm surface width (5 cm added by the edges). Unlike the original MARS, it has a fixed height of 81 cm, while the surface is 74 cm deep. The side edges of the Cougar MARS 120 feature a couple of RGB LED diffusers. Besides an auxiliary power connection, the desk plugs into a USB 3.0 port and HDA jacks of your machine to put out one each of USB 3.0 and USB 2.0 downstream ports, headset jacks, and a button to cycle through some RGB presets. The RGB setup can interface with most popular ARGB control software. The desk has a load bearing capacity of 150 kg. The company didn't reveal pricing.

ASUS' Republic of Gamers MARS III dual-GeForce GTX 680 graphics card may have been extensively covered at this year's Computex event, but very few have had a peek at its innards (PCB). Expreview posted pictures of the card's PCB, sourced from the manufacturer.

The pictures reveal an unusually long and tall PCB, which draws power from three 8-pin PCIe power connectors, a 21-phase VRM that uses Super Alloy chokes and driver-MOSFETs, PLX PEX8747 PCI-Express 3.0 x48 bridge chip, and of course the two GK104 GPUs with a total of 32 individual GDDR5 memory chips (16 for each GPU, 16 on each side of the PCB) wired to them, totaling 8 GB of memory.

Edit: We received an update from ASUS, clarifying that this card will not be released. The design was only displayed during a factory tour, to show ASUS craftmanship.

When ASUS first set out to build the MARS, a dual-GeForce GTX 285 graphics card, people thought the designers were crazy. NVIDIA could barely get the two 55 nm G200b GPUs on GeForce GTX 295 to run at GTX 285 specifications of 240 shaders and 512-bit GDDR3 each, and instead ran them with 448-bit wide GDDR3 memory interface, and lower clocks. ASUS managed to back two GPUs with insanely strong VRM and cooling, to achieve a dual-GPU graphics card that was more than just a GTX 295 overclocked. ASUS is back on the drawing boards with MARS II, a new dual-GPU graphics card that runs two GF110 GPUs in the same exact config as on GeForce GTX 580, perhaps with clock speeds higher than those of GTX 580.

The GeForce GTX 590 runs two GF110 GPUs with all CUDA cores and the complete width of the memory bus enabled, but the GPUs and memory are clocked significantly lower at 607 MHz core, 1214 MHz CUDA cores, and 3.42 GHz memory; while the single-GPU GTX 580 runs at 772 MHz core, 1544 MHz CUDA cores, and 4.00 GHz memory. MARS II also aims to get over the various design pitfalls of GTX 590 that made voltage-assisted overclocking practically impossible on air-cooling. To do this, MARS II will make use of a massive 19-phase VRM with Super Alloy chokes. To cool the beast, ASUS will put to use the expertise it gathered over time with its DirectCu series video card coolers. The new cooler will provide uniform cooling to both GPUs. More details, particularly about the when the card will be released, are awaited.

After treating the enthusiast community to the Republic of Gamers (ROG) ARES Dual HD 5870 graphics accelerator, ASUS isn't wasting any time is designing its successor, referred to (for now) as "MARS II". This graphics accelerator uses two NVIDIA GeForce GTX 480 (GF100) GPUs on one board, that's right, the first dual-GPU accelerator based on GF100, which is dreaded for its thermal and electrical characteristics so much, that NVIDIA is content with having the second-fastest graphics card in the market (GTX 480), with no immediate plans of working on a dual-GPU accelerator.

ASUS' ambitious attempt is in the design stage deep inside its R&D, where the design is in an evaluation state. The R&D gave us some exclusive pictures of the MARS II PCB to treat you with. To begin with, the card's basic design is consistent with almost every other dual-GPU NVIDIA card in recent past. There are two independent GPU systems, each with its own VRM and memory, which are interconnected by an internal SLI, and connected to the system bus by an nForce 200 bridge chip. On this card, two GF100 GPUs with the same configuration as GeForce GTX 480 (GF100-375-A3) are used, each having 480 CUDA cores, and connecting to 1536 MB of GDDR5 memory across a 384-bit wide memory interface.

ASUS' pixel-crunching monstrosity, the dual-GTX 285 MARS 4GB was unveiled earlier this year at Computex. It claims to be the most powerful graphics card ever made, as it packs two fully-loaded GeForce GTX 285 GPUs which are factory overclocked, and equipped with 2 GB each of GDDR3 memory (4 GB total memory). The card further edges GeForce GTX 295, by using 512-bit memory interfaces for each GPU. The card further carries the clock speeds of GeForce GTX 285, at 648/1476/2400 MHz (core/shader/memory).

Fresh information suggests that that this limited-edition graphics card is another week away from shipping. 1000 units are produced in all, and the company doesn't plan on making any more. What's interesting however is that most, if not all, of these 1000 units have been pre-ordered and paid for. Enthusiasts don't seem to have a problem paying US $1250 (1250 EUR) for a piece, its price. Below are some tasty press-shots of this really tall accelerator, fully assembled. Pictures of its PCB and components can be viewed in our older article here.

ASUS' Republic of Gamers (ROG), a brand synonymous with gaming and overclocking, today presented a host of innovations and products designed to provide users with the ultimate experience in high performance gaming and overclocking. These include ROG's exclusive MemOK! one-click memory rescue tool for effortless and worry-free memory upgrades, the limited edition ASUS ROG MARS GTX 295 graphics card that shatters all existing graphics benchmarks, and the world's most intelligent graphics card-the ROG MATRIX GTX 285. Other highlights include a 120 Hz 3D-ready Gaming Monitor that provides users with an immersive gaming experience, and the ASUS W90 notebook-a mobile gaming powerhouse that has recently set a Guinness World Record in overclocking. With such an impressive line-up, ASUS is once again poised to set the gaming and overclocking scene alight.

ASUS has just designed a new monster graphics card that breaks the mold for reference design GeForce GTX 295, called the ASUS MARS 295 Limited Edition. The card, although retains the name "GeForce GTX 295", same device ID, and is compatible with existing NVIDIA drivers, has two huge innovations put in by ASUS, which go far beyond being yet another overclocked GeForce GTX 295: the company used two G200-350-B3 graphics processors, the same ones that make the GeForce GTX 285. The GPUs have all the 240 shader processors enabled, and also have the complete 512-bit GDDR3 memory interface enabled. This dual-PCB monstrosity holds 32 memory chips, and 4 GB of total memory (each GPU accesses 2 GB of it). Apart from these, each GPU system uses the same exact clock speeds as the GeForce GTX 285: 648/1476/2400 MHz (core/shader/memory).

Early testing of the latest Quantum Force motherboard, due for release in 2008, has achieved staggering 3DMark06 scores for the mid-range Radeon HD3870 cards and produced stable overclocks of 6080MHz for the latest Intel processors. With a score of 28,313 the test has produced one of the highest 3DMark06 scores of all time, and a new world record using the mid-range HD3870 graphics cards. In separate tests, Foxconn engineers easily overclocked an Intel QX9770 Core 2 Extreme processor to 6GHz, running it stably using LN2 cooling. As a result of the latest tests, engineers are "extremely confident" about the overclocking headroom and stability the forthcoming motherboard will afford enthusiasts.

Foxconn today officially announced the launch of its first true overclocking motherboard; MARS will be the first in a new product line called Quantum Force, which will be dedicated to overclocking and gaming enthusiasts. Based on the Intel P35 chipset, MARS has been specially tuned for overclocking performance, and has undergone extensive testing and trials by some of the world's leading overclockers before release to retail customers in September.