ASUS MARS 2 Video Card Development Pictures

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The crew at Legit Reviews posted a few spy pics of the ASUS MARS II dual GTX 480 video card. I snagged this picture for those of you too lazy to click the link. Everyone else should head on over to see the rest of the pictures.
 
Three 8 pin power plugs:eek::eek:

Any guess what this will cost.......I say about $1200 at least, briefcase not included.
 
Lotsa power circuitry it looks like. I wonder what they whited out... it's round, but that doesn't help me guess.
 
That POS reminds me of this POS:

7voodoo5-6000.jpg
 
I was just gonna say where'd my Voodoo 6 6000 or whatever it was called.

This is probably along the same lines as that limited edition ati dual gpu card asus was doing.
 
Deviationer said:
That wouldn't matter. The max for windows is 4 GPUs.
Click to expand...

Not true.

Tell that to the people who ran (or still are) running 3x 9800GX2 for 6 GPUs in a system. I ran a system like that for almost a year. There are also a few that are running 4x 9800GX2 in a single box.

Fold on!

 
ICOM said:
Voodoo_5_6000.jpg
Click to expand...

Seriously though, this has had me concerned for a little while.

Towards the end of its life 3DFX was not able to keep up with the competition from a low-power / high tech standpoint and was only able to compete by building huge, hot, power hungry multi-core boards.

I certainly hope this is not Nvidias first step in theat direction.

I mean there are several paralells, a hugely delayed product launch brough on by difficulties from trying a new approach being one of them.

(Voodoo 5 was delayed due to 3DFX trying to do their own board manufacturing through STB, FERMI was delayed due to its ambitious attempt to become a more general purpose computing chip, rather than a strictly dedicated 3D accelerator)

On the positive side, Nvidias FERMI launch was not so late that it was no longer competitive once hitting the market, like Voodoo 5 was, and FERMI has a very forward looking design that hopefully will give Nvidia some long term advantages, if the market pans out the way they hope it will.
 
This has nothing to do with Nvidia repeating 3DFX's mistakes. It's just Asus showing off their engineering.
 
Matrices said:
This has nothing to do with Nvidia repeating 3DFX's mistakes. It's just Asus showing off their engineering.
Click to expand...

This particular unit, maybe not, but it is reminiscent, and look at how power hungry the GTX400 series of boards are compared to their AMD/ATI counterparts. The same was true for the last couple of Voodoo generations where they were trying to brute force it to make up for the performance gap...
 
Um Asus made Mars cards based on AMD chips before so, wouldn't that mean AMD is going the way of 3DFX :rolleyes:

Asus makes these cards because they can, that's it.
 
Zarathustra[H];1035963830 said:
Seriously though, this has had me concerned for a little while.

Towards the end of its life 3DFX was not able to keep up with the competition from a low-power / high tech standpoint and was only able to compete by building huge, hot, power hungry multi-core boards.

I certainly hope this is not Nvidias first step in theat direction.

I mean there are several paralells, a hugely delayed product launch brough on by difficulties from trying a new approach being one of them.

(Voodoo 5 was delayed due to 3DFX trying to do their own board manufacturing through STB, FERMI was delayed due to its ambitious attempt to become a more general purpose computing chip, rather than a strictly dedicated 3D accelerator)

On the positive side, Nvidias FERMI launch was not so late that it was no longer competitive once hitting the market, like Voodoo 5 was, and FERMI has a very forward looking design that hopefully will give Nvidia some long term advantages, if the market pans out the way they hope it will.
Click to expand...


Nvidia treded dangerous water I'll say that. I am a bit surprised at how many people were so desperate to stay Nvidia that they bought those GTX480 despite the universally limited warranties and hardware problems.

Had they waited any longer to get these cards out who knows what kinda shape they'd be in.
 
The way my computer was positioned, caused all the heat of the GTX480 to go right under neath my desk and it became like a heater. I was drinking water like a mad man on Friday, 80 degrees outside, I had 2 overclocked Core 2 Quads, an i7, a GTX 285 and a GTX 480 running in my room, my friend decided to drink some Mountain Dew around lunch, but nothing else during the day. It got so hot he almost passed out. Ended up moving my computer the next day to the outside of my desk and it runs cooler (changed some of the air flow around again), and more importantly I'm a lot cooler.

Now I'm seriously scared of how hot it could get with a dual GTX 480.
 
piscian18 said:
Nvidia treded dangerous water I'll say that. I am a bit surprised at how many people were so desperate to stay Nvidia that they bought those GTX480 despite the universally limited warranties and hardware problems.

Had they waited any longer to get these cards out who knows what kinda shape they'd be in.
Click to expand...

I actually just ordered a GTX 470 because of the poor Linux driver support for the Evergreen GPU's. I was gig to get a 460, but the one I wanted was sold out everywhere and then I found a deal on a 470 that wasn't much more expensive..
 
My lights dimmed just viewing the image.


I've been preaching the parallels between Fermi and Voodoo for some time now, nV isn't going to fold like 3dFX did, they've still got the Photoshop market cornered with CUDA so they're safe for a bit.
Now, if Intel goes and changes how they make the Atom processor, and maybe make it with the Nehalem core's architecture change, then they might be in trouble. Discreet Graphics cannot be the companies only product, there's just not a big enough market to make it viable, or profitable give R&D and what-not
Personally I hope that they do get the smack-down for how they've let their executives run their mouths.
 
Zarathustra[H];1035963830 said:
Seriously though, this has had me concerned for a little while.

Towards the end of its life 3DFX was not able to keep up with the competition from a low-power / high tech standpoint and was only able to compete by building huge, hot, power hungry multi-core boards.

I certainly hope this is not Nvidias first step in theat direction.

I mean there are several paralells, a hugely delayed product launch brough on by difficulties from trying a new approach being one of them.

(Voodoo 5 was delayed due to 3DFX trying to do their own board manufacturing through STB, FERMI was delayed due to its ambitious attempt to become a more general purpose computing chip, rather than a strictly dedicated 3D accelerator)

On the positive side, Nvidias FERMI launch was not so late that it was no longer competitive once hitting the market, like Voodoo 5 was, and FERMI has a very forward looking design that hopefully will give Nvidia some long term advantages, if the market pans out the way they hope it will.
Click to expand...

NVidia has had missteps before and recovered. Remember the 5800s that people called "Dustbusters?" Those were also power-hungry and hot, with very loud fans. Also, unlike the current chip, they underperformed. But then they learned from their mistakes and released the very successful 6800 series, and on from there.

Tom's has a cool history to jog your memory:

Link
 
Zarathustra[H];1035964150 said:
I actually just ordered a GTX 470 because of the poor Linux driver support for the Evergreen GPU's. I was gig to get a 460, but the one I wanted was sold out everywhere and then I found a deal on a 470 that wasn't much more expensive..
Click to expand...

Waiting on TD get another brand besides Galaxy on the GTX460 1GB personally. Noise is a factor for me.

I cant blame you for wanting linux support. Nvidias always gonna be the way to go for folding and what not I spose.
 
Correct me if im wrong but didnt nvidia do a hostile take over of 3dfx? and i love my vodoo5 5500
 
lehmann said:
Correct me if im wrong but didnt nvidia do a hostile take over of 3dfx? and i love my vodoo5 5500
Click to expand...

Nah, I believe what happened was that 3DFX filed for bankruptcy, and Nvidia bought their technology assetts (chip designs, patents, etc) at auction. If I recall correclty, this helped NVidia immensely in theirSLI development, cause at the time 3DFX was the only company with a decent multi-GPU solution...
 
piscian18 said:
Waiting on TD get another brand besides Galaxy on the GTX460 1GB personally. Noise is a factor for me.

I cant blame you for wanting linux support. Nvidias always gonna be the way to go for folding and what not I spose.
Click to expand...

Yeah, I wanted the MSI Cyclone 1GB version, because 1GB is the way to go, and the Cyclone is nice and quiet (or so I read) but it was out of stock everywhere, and then I reasoned that most cards are uiet at idle anyway these days, as they automatically lower the voltageand produce less heat whne idle.

I don't really care that much about noise at load, because its rare, other people are rarely in the room when it happens, and I'm usually wearing sound-proofed headphones anyway :p
 
Zarathustra[H];1035964433 said:
Nah, I believe what happened was that 3DFX filed for bankruptcy, and Nvidia bought their technology assetts (chip designs, patents, etc) at auction. If I recall correclty, this helped NVidia immensely in theirSLI development, cause at the time 3DFX was the only company with a decent multi-GPU solution...
Click to expand...

to correct you, 3dFX was not the only card with a multi-gpu solution. ATI RageMaxx was also a dual GPU part for what it's worth. They had called it Alternate Frame Rendering rather than Scan Line Interleave like 3dFX did.

Unfortunately they did not work with NT5 ( 2k, XP ) and that they never followed that up when they started the Radeon line,
can you imagine if the managed to pull a dual 9700pro card out, back when the GF6k's started gaining market share?
 
If you watercool it, you could probably pipe it through a turbine to power the card(s). :D

Nice to see Asus having the balls to do something like this.
 
RumpleForeSkin said:
to correct you, 3dFX was not the only card with a multi-gpu solution. ATI RageMaxx was also a dual GPU part for what it's worth. They had called it Alternate Frame Rendering rather than Scan Line Interleave like 3dFX did.

Unfortunately they did not work with NT5 ( 2k, XP ) and that they never followed that up when they started the Radeon line,
can you imagine if the managed to pull a dual 9700pro card out, back when the GF6k's started gaining market share?
Click to expand...

If you re-read what I wrote, I said 3DFX was the only company with a decent multi GPU solution. :p

The RageMaxx pumped out some impressive numbers but was absolutely torn apart in the reviews because its alternating frame rendering technique introduced a 2 frame response lag for interactive games. If just rendering non-interactive cutscenes it was really impressice for its time though.

The NT5 issue did put the nail in the coffin for the technology, but it was already pretty ridiculed at the time due to the lag problems with AFR, and could never really compete with the single Geforce 256.
 
Zarathustra[H];1035964734 said:
If you re-read what I wrote, I said 3DFX was the only company with a decent multi GPU solution. :p

The RageMaxx pumped out some impressive numbers but was absolutely torn apart in the reviews because its alternating frame rendering technique introduced a 2 frame response lag for interactive games. If just rendering non-interactive cutscenes it was really impressice for its time though.

The NT5 issue did put the nail in the coffin for the technology, but it was already pretty ridiculed at the time due to the lag problems with AFR, and could never really compete with the single Geforce 256.
Click to expand...


Ahh, here we go, I found the original illustration :p

It's amazing what google can do...

4809821482_930c047efb_o.gif
 
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