Introduction

First seen at Computex this year, ASUS today released their long awaited ASUS MARS II. The MARS II is the first dual GeForce GTX 580 card, and is part of ASUS Republic of Gamers (ROG) brand of premium products targeting the gamer-overclocker market. Please note that ASUS did not choose the "GeForce GTX 590" name, even though the ASUS MARS II is a dual-GPU design. Rather they went with calling it Dual GeForce GTX 580, which makes sense since the MARS II comes at the full GeForce GTX 580 clock speeds. instead of the reduced clocked of the GTX 590.



ASUS has also added another significant change to the MARS II: Unlike the GTX 590, the card does not use any power limiting system. While this means higher performance, it also means increased power and thermal requirements for the ASUS MARS II. To take care of this, ASUS has designed a 21 phase power circuitry which is almost twice as powerful as the 11 phases of the GTX 590. To take care of the heat the ASUS MARS II uses a triple slot Direct CU cooler with two fans.

In terms of pricing the limited edition ASUS MARS II is the most expensive single graphics card released so far. Prices are expected to be around $1499 online!