Reviews - ASUS Republic of Gamers MARS II graphics card review

[HEXUS]

From the sublime to the ridiculous.

Read more.

[kalniel]

And the SLI test?

[Terbinator]

And the SLI test?

This^.

[jim]

Any suitable mini-itx cases?

[this_is_gav]

So... when's the competition?

[shaithis]

pfft not interested if you can't tri-sli them

[sammorris]

Using anachronistic 1.5GB 580 GPUs should cap it at 3 stars, due to it not being able to compete with the stock HD6990 for memory reasons. If a superior product is half the price, at this price point, this should frankly score worse than just 'it's a bit pricey'

[Georgy291]

why are all 590w expelled in to the case, can they not throw it out the back?

[Terbinator]

why are all 590w expelled in to the case, can they not throw it out the back?

An external exhaust approach isn't efficient at actually cooling the GPU's, something of key importance for this card. The centred approaches tend to be quieter as well due to them not having tor un as loud from my experience.

[Colossous]

Big - heavy and daft expensive !

[thomasxstewart]

two possiblities, one since new pcie3 mains give 20% boost to pci-e2, by being faster, more stable, try that. next: mars II recommended to overclock to 1 Ghz/s & runs far better when overclocked. Two in sli, well, supposedly newegg has platnium edition of mars II at mere $529. two models. Platnium has P as last letter. maybe in sli onpci-e3, best out, plus pci-e3 ssd & ddr3 2.5 Gb/s with extreme cpu, maybe world smashing performer.at least look up into pci-e3 stability in such Monsterous system.

vondrashek md

[Blackmage]

No overclocking?

[dfour]

No overclocking?

Overclocking
We'd normally devote an entire page to the overclocking results for a card of this ilk. Having such little time with it prohibited us from our usual in-depth testing. We managed to get the sample stable at 800MHz core and 4,200MHz memory, but we'll revisit this section once we have a card on long-term test.

Later

What a card and what a price

[sammorris]

What a card? Not really. If it were 3GB GPUs, it'd be worth considering. As it stands, it is literally two standard GTX580s on one board, for the cost of three of them.

At the time, the 4GB HD5970 cards from Sapphire and XFX seemed outrageously expensive, and not only were they a fair bit less than 3 times the single card price, they were also fully-clocked full-memory versions of the HD5870. The equivalent card to the MARS 2 back then would have been selling an ordinary HD5970 with just under HD5870 clockspeeds.

Good to see that in AvP, not a game renowned for giving Radeons an easy ride, the two HD6970s I bought for exactly half the MSRP of this card (£575 vs £1150) more than six months ago, attain an absolutely identical frame rate at my resolution (2560x1600). They aren't noisy, they don't run particularly hot, and they exhaust their heat out the case. What Asus have done here is create a card of £600 value (we'll give them an extra 50 for it being in one card that doesn't fit in almost any case, as opposed to two cards that fit in a reasonable number of cases), and charge very nearly double that for it.

The good thing about these cards is that they're produced in sufficiently small quantities, there are sufficiently many fanboys of whoever the manufacturer is, that they'll sell regardless of cost or performance, case in point the original MARS295. It's all about 'the company that makes the fastest ever card'. Irony is, they haven't, but people will think they did just because it's two 580s instead of two 6970s on the board.

I'm not immediately opposed to the idea of the high-end '2 on a card' system. I used two 4870X2s in QuadCF for two years, and despite some problems in the first few years (mislabelled faulty PSUs from Bequiet, faulty PCIe controllers on Gigabyte boards and of course, dodgy drivers), for the latter 18 months it was pretty smooth sailing, apart from the screaming fan noise, it was a reliable system, just at 810W AC highload and 1KW AC peak stress, and around 60dB, it was a bit of a handful.

I did even go as far as buying (or trying to, at least) one of the regular 4GB HD5970s from Sapphire. Credit where credit's due, it was very quiet, but unfortunately the cards, like many of sapphire's products these days, bypassed the QC section, so it was left to the customer to discover any faulty cards. Since the cards were pretty poorly made, this meant that the entire available stock in the UK for a month or so (2 cards) was DOA, after which point I simply got a refund, waited another 6 months and bought a faster set of cards for two thirds the price. Difficult to decide who the blame really lied with there, Sapphire for being one of the lowest quality partner brands, or Arctic cooling for being renowned for producing faulty graphics coolers (and who produced the cooler on the 4GB 5970).

Long story short, even if you did have all that money to spare, buying one of these high-end monsters is no easy ride. Apart from needing to check the rest of your system meets the long list of requirements, the % DOA with these "hand-tested" [Sapphire's words] high-end products is often higher than that with regular cards that do 90% of the work for a lot less than 90% of the price. With all this taken into account, they need to really perform to be worth bothering with. So when Asus drops this stinker on the desk that is no faster than an HD6990, at least, certainly not with the switch unlocked (and indeed, can do less due to the memory limitations), it categorically defines anyone who buys it as either 'I had £1200 to spend on a card, look at me!', 'I'll buy anything with an Asus sticker on it', 'I'll buy anything with an nvidia sticker on it' or 'I just bought the most expensive card, didn't bother checking whether it was any good or not'.

There's none of my usual Asus prejudice here, even from an objective standpoint this card's just terrible.

/rant

[Roobubba]

There's none of my usual Asus prejudice here, even from an objective standpoint this card's just terrible.

/rant

I can't agree with you here - while it's completely fair to say that this card is of course way, way overpriced for what it is, it's incredibly heavy and large and doesn't outperform other high end cards perhaps as much as would be hoped for, it's not 'just terrible.'

Taking the performance figures aside from all of its faults, it pretty much beats everything out there, except where there is obvious CPU limitation (is it time to stop testing graphics cards in Starcraft II? That game is quite clearly not GPU limited!). The fact that it, on average in this one set of tests, outperforms the 580 SLI setup while consuming less power and emitting less temperature and noise is commendable.
That's not to say that the vast majority of us look at it and think "yes, but I can get almost all of that performance for nowhere near that much cost..."

But the same can be said of the 'top end' of anything - there comes a point where you pay over the odds for a bit better X or Y. The fact that you're in the vast majority group with regards to this card doesn't make it 'just terrible.'

Roo

[danroyle]

And the SLI test?

and then the competition for members with a minimum 3500 post count for entry to win them