When you look at the price and the specs of the ASUS MARS Dual GTX 285 you will quickly realize that it is not made for everyone (that's also why we are not giving a numeric score for this card). In my opinion the card is useful only for the most extreme of benchmarkers, tweakers and gamers. Its noise level even makes it a limited choice for gamers, it is simply too noisy - at least for me. If you strive to claim the leading spots in benchmarking competition this is the right toy for you. Especially if you plan to fit it with a more extreme cooling solution like dry ice or liquid nitrogen. ASUS has taken special care of those users by making the interconnect cables longer so you won't run into space limitations. Overclocking this card felt like trying to tame a wild mustang, it is not simply a case of bumping the clocks and you are done. Using the stock air cooler you will quickly hit a heat wall causing the card to overheat and limiting your overclock. Actually I am quite unhappy with the stock cooler, even at default clocks it runs quite high temperatures. Going for a more powerful cooler would have been a wise choice in my opinion.
ATI and NVIDIA will both release graphics cards with a new architecture that should increase performance and include support for newer technologies like DirectX 10.1 and DirectX 11. However, it will be a while until we see a widespread adoption of DX 11 features in major titles, so this should only be of secondary concern. Even though AMD's upcoming cards bring a massive performance boost in single GPU performance, the ASUS MARS will still be the fastest single card available.
With a price of around USD 1200 and a limited production of 1000 cards total, this card will not be available to the masses, especially since a large number of customers will opt for two MARS cards to maximize their benchmark scores. Being built on SLI technology this card requires optimum driver support to properly scale in the latest titles, but that is the case with any multi-GPU solution no matter if it's made by ATI or NVIDIA. Recently NVIDIA has been very agressive in keeping SLI compatible with as many games as possible by periodically rolling out SLI patches.
Going against NVIDIA's rigid policy of making sure high-end graphics cards are sold the way they were meant to be played (look the same, different sticker), props go to ASUS' engineering team for this refreshing new take on the high-end GeForce GTX 200 series. We are pretty sure the support extended by NVIDIA in designing this card would have been limited, but ASUS pulled it off, displaying high standards of engineering and courage to try something new.