If you’re looking for peerless gaming performance, you need the new ASUS ROG MARS graphics card
Asus has quite a track record when it comes to groundbreaking graphics cards. Its designs have been setting new standards ever since it produced the first graphics card with advanced over clocking capability in 1997. This year, however, saw ASUS launch its most spectacular card to date.
ASUS ROG MARS
Out of this World
The name may be out of the ordinary, but that’s because the ASUS ROG MARS is far from a run-of the-mill graphics card. At its heart lie not one, but two NVIDIA GTX 285 GPUs — and that makes this card something special.
Alone, the NVIDIA GTX 285 is the most powerful single graphics processor money can buy, but when two are combined — and expertly over clocked by ASUS — the result is the fastest graphics card on the planet. Undeniable proof of the graphics card’s might comes from the industry-standard 3DMark Vantage Extreme Preset DirectX 10 benchmark. The ROG MARS yields an astounding 23% improvement in terms of single card performance when compared to reference boards, setting eye-popping 3DMark Vantage Extreme Preset scores of X25949 with Quad SLI®. Benchmarks are one thing, but gamers are more concerned with real-world performance. The ASUS ROG MARS can achieve frame rates of 28fps when running Crysis Warhead at 2560 x 1600, compared to 16fps for reference boards. The ROG MARS increases its performance by 75% to allow users to fully enjoy games without lag or stuttering. At Computex 2009, ASUS had a test rig with twin ROG MARS cards running Far Cry 2 at silky-smooth frame rates at an unbelievable 3840 x 2160 on a huge 52″ display.
Available in a strictly limited edition of 1,000 units, the ASUS ROG MARS is a superior piece of cutting-edge technology that any gamer in pursuit
Keeping Cool
Creating such a phenomenally powerful graphics card was not without its challenges. Perhaps the biggest was figuring out a way to cool the two NVIDIA GTX 285 GPUs effectively.
After abandoning the initial idea of water cooling as being impractical, the ASUS research and development team finally came up with a new air-cooling system that uses eight heat pipes. This new design covers an area that’s 65% larger than on the NVIDIA reference board, ensuring that the ROG MARS can cope with the most demanding games without breaking a sweat.