Over the years, Asus has accustomed us with its outrageous graphics cards designs, and the soon-to-be-released dual GTX 580 Mars II is no exception to this rule as the card features a custom-built PCB which allowed the company to clock the card higher than the default GF110 operating frequencies.The redesigned PCB is also paired together with a massive cooler that occupies no less than three slots inside the system case and it features two high-performance 120mm fans.These are placed on top of an full length aluminum heatsink, which cools both the GF110 GPUs and the 19-phase VRM installed.
According to Asus, this is capable of delivering 15% better performance, 35 degrees Celsius cooler operation and 2.5 times longer lifespan than the reference GTX 590 design and enables the company to clock the two GPUs at 816MHz.
This makes the Mars II the fastest dual-GPU GF110 graphics card around, as it beats Nvidia's own implementation of a dual GTX 580 solution by 209MHz (34.4%).
To deliver the massive amount of power required, Asus' Mars II has been fitted with three 8-pin PCI Express connectors which are placed right near a special button that is used to adjust the voltage and the fan speed to 100%.
The rest of the overclocking-oriented features are placed on the back of the PCB, in a so-called Zone MOD area, which can be used to turn off Nvidia's OCP, to enable a special LN2 mode or to tweak the board's PLL si VMEM voltages.
Furthermore, the card will be shipped together with a new version of the GPU Tweak application, that allows real-time frequency, voltage and fan speed adjustments.
Just as its predecessor, the Mars II will only be manufactured in 1000 units and its price tag is expected to be set at $1000 US. Asus will officially launch the card in July of this year. (via NordicHardware)
