ASUS ROG MARS II GTX 580 SLI Video Card Review @ [H]

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FrgMstr

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ASUS ROG MARS II GTX 580 SLI Video Card Review - The ASUS ROG MARS II Limited Edition video card brings true dual-GeForce GTX 580 GPUs to the table. Take two of these and you can have a true GTX 580 Quad-SLI system. We'll dive into performance, including Battlefield 3, and see what these can do directly compared to 4-way CrossFireX.
 
I'm insanely perplexed why they didn't give these things 6GBs per GPU. Ok, maybe not that much (but just for marketing they should have). But no 3GB is insane.

Also, am I the only one that thought "CPU limited" the whole time while looking at the non-v.ram limited graphs?

Yes, I know it's being run at 4.8Ghz on a 2600k, but it might not be enough for those beasts.
 
Very interesting read, if only academic for me. Not to mention the need of a dedicated 15amp outlet to plug these into to be safe.

I'm actually surprised the 6990 held up as well as it did vs. a Mars II card considering the HW differences, and ... being less than half price.

The 2GB really does matter.

Also noteworthy is how inconsistent the drivers are for quad setups seem to be, not too much demand I would guess.

Nice job on the review!

And now... how about maybe... raffling off those Mars II cards? :D
 
Wonder how they would have held up to the MARS dual 6970's Asus had a while back. They should be better then the 6990's.
 
I'm glad to see some eyefinity BF3 benchmarks! That extra VRAM is looking like a must.
 
Hmmm...this review was a cool read but I'm a little confused by the 590 bashing at the intro and conclusion. It's to be expected that the MARS II would be faster...after all - it costs as much as two 590's. Although I agree with the direction Nvidia took with the 590 I think they would have pleased the enthusiast masses more if they had put a leaf blower on it and while maintaing 580 speeds rather than concentrating on keeping it quiet & reliable while only taking up two slots.
 
Nearly 1200W at fullload,that's just epic. :eek:

And if they do make a 6GB model (3GB per GPU),we'll have a mother of all video cards.
 
Informative review, but I don't understand the gold award at the end. This is a $1500 card, and the $750 6990 seemed to hold its own against it (at least in the dual-GPU configuration). It may be a neat card, but its a tragic waste of money. Any other review i've seen by [H] takes performance for your dollar into account... why does this one not?
 
All this proves to me is that we need more demanding games and higher resolution monitors (and video cards with the memory bandwidth to support them).

Bring on the 3840 × 2400 displays!
 
Viper87227 said:
Informative review, but I don't understand the gold award at the end. This is a $1500 card, and the $750 6990 seemed to hold its own against it (at least in the dual-GPU configuration). It may be a neat card, but its a tragic waste of money. Any other review i've seen by [H] takes performance for your dollar into account... why does this one not?
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Like he said in the article its stupid expensive. They were just giving you the run down on this insane card. The 6990 was just to compare. Obviously the MARS II is in a world of it own here especially when it cost as much as a nice complete brand new rig. It was given the gold award because no other card in existence can perform this high at those settings.
 
SomeoneElse said:
Like he said in the article its stupid expensive. They were just giving you the run down on this insane card. The 6990 was just to compare. Obviously the MARS II is in a world of it own here especially when it cost as much as a nice complete brand new rig. It was given the gold award because no other card in existence can perform this high at those settings.
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Yeah, I saw that they acknowledged the price... but still, every other review takes cost into account when dishing out judgment. I've seen plenty where an otherwise good product was not recommended because it was too expensive. I'm not knocking the review, I have always been curios to see what these cards would do in SLI. I just don't see the card as being deserving of a gold award. Might be the fastest card, but its still incredibly impractical.
 
haha god I love these MARS cards. They satisfy the nerds requirement to see/have THE MOST EPIC HARDWARE EVER!

Of course I can't afford this but man do I want, price vs perf be damned!

(Give them 3gb per GPU please)
 
Great informative review.

I am also a little perplexed though. If building a system around one of these cards, wouldn't you simply be better off going with 2 - single GTX 580 cards instead of just one of these dual GPU versions at a significantly higher price?

The only real benifit I can see with such a card would be the ability to go Quad SLI, but as we can see with the benchmarks, you are VRAM limited. And as [H] indicates, you get better and smoother performance out of the AMD 6990 CrossfireX configuration. This in my mind defeats the purpose of the Asus's cards existence..

I give major props to Asus for thinking outside of the box, and hope to see more of this type of innovative thinking from them in the future.

But a gold award, no way. Silver at best.

Simply put, the card needs more RAM.
 
So........$1499..........and you have to pay $10 shipping.......jesus.

Nice card and even more interesting insight.

I'll keep my 6990, thank you.;)
 
The article reads like an Asus press release. Beastly card, but even one is out of my computer budget.
 
Silent Knight said:
Nearly 1200W at fullload,that's just epic. :eek:

And if they do make a 6GB model (3GB per GPU),we'll have a mother of all video cards.
Click to expand...

that is crazy. i wonder how high it would have been if they used the i7 920 at 3.6. over 1200 watts, almost at the max of the psu.
 
Nose is a bit brown in this review. Is the [H] worried ASUS will not send more cards to review unless the review sings their praises consistently?

This is a custom card so ASUS could have done what they wanted. When going multiGPU, the amount of VRAM becomes central to the overall performance yet time and time again, manufacturers fail to deliver.

Now I'd like to see this card go against two GTX580 cards with 3GB of VRAM each. Several manufacturers make them now. Heck, you could even get 2 GTX580 cards with 3GB VRAM from EVGA that are WATERCOOLED for $40 less than this reviewed card. I'd bet that when all said and done, the EVGA setup will crush this ASUS card.

So, basically, the GTX580x2 card had 2 niches; quad SLI setups and those with only one PCI-E slot on their motherboard who want SLI. The former case is pointless with the low VRAM and the other is ridiculous as who would buy a $1500 video card and not spend what was necessary to get a real SLI or CFX motherboard.

So, thanks for the review but who is this really for anyway? :confused:
 
what a complete utter waste of money... $1500 for one card... $3000 for two...

Why not go get 4 580s and OC them for $2000 spending a $1000 on water cooling and you will have a system that runs faster and cooler.
 
And it was a great review with a ton of Quantitative information!

But for a Gold award, shouldn't it at least come with 3G of RAM per GPU and layed the smack down in Quad SLI??
 
One would think that for the money they want for this card, they'd put 3gb per gpu:rolleyes:
 
Viper87227 said:
...It may be a neat card, but its a tragic waste of money. Any other review i've seen by [H] takes performance for your dollar into account... why does this one not?
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If I had a nice triple monitor setup for gaming, I'd have to go with the 6990 at this point...

Particularly knowing that when games are released they're not targeting video cards with a median price anywhere near $1,500. I realize a single $150 card is not going to deliver optimal game performance on a triple screen setup, but a person who can afford to not set limits on their gaming hardware budget is probably going to be frugal enough to go with the better value ATi solution since that's probably in their genetic makeup - most rich people aren't money-wasters...

Let's say I spent $600 for two $300 cards to drive a triple screen gaming setup - there is a piece of hardware that I would REALLY want to have along with this which might make more sense than Asus' cards reviewed in the article:

Eye tracking device. With eye tracking the system could, in real time, render with the ultimate possible detail the area of the screen that the user is looking at. As the distance from that point on the screen increases the amount of GPU power used to render that portion could be adjusted proportionally. This would allow for dramatic improvement in apparent quality with whatever GPU hardware the system happens to have. I realize that this idea is not new, but I have yet to see it available on a consumer PC device used in this manner. I think I recall a variety of existing applications/hardware devices doing eye tracking? (For disabled people, for instance) Is it in the pipeline to apply that technology in this way?
 
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sboucher said:
But a gold award, no way. Silver at best.

Simply put, the card needs more RAM.
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It's Gold because Asus did what nVidia couldn't do. It's impressive feat. Expensive, but a great product.

I agree with other comments about buying 2x single GTX 580's though, it makes more sense financially. It would have been nice to see the Tri-SLI in the same review because it's the same price.

But I understand Kyle is pimping Asus for what they accomplished with this card.
Tri-SLI is the true competitor though.
 
J Macker said:
It's Gold because Asus did what nVidia couldn't do. It's impressive feat. Expensive, but a great product.

I agree with other comments about buying 2x single GTX 580's though, it makes more sense financially. It would have been nice to see the Tri-SLI in the same review because it's the same price.

But I understand Kyle is pimping Asus and Tri-SLI GTX 580's would destroy a single ROG dual 580 card, even though the Tri-SLI is the true competitor.
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I get that J Macker, and again give lots of props to Asus for doing it. But they came up a bit short in performance, especially given the price.

jcollet said it best:

"When going multiGPU, the amount of VRAM becomes central to the overall performance yet time and time again, manufacturers fail to deliver. "
 
Why are people bitching about this review? This card is the top end for GPU tech, who wouldn't want to read this review?

To address the point about dollar/performance its fucking 1500 dollars, H KNOWS 99% of the people reading this review are not buying this card, the card was NEVER designed for a price/performance ratio, it was designed to KICK FUCKING ASS. I hate to use car analogies but it's exactly like reading a review about a $500,000 sports car and complaining it has bad fuel economy.

I like the fact that H doesn't have some canned review formula they apply to every single product. This card should only have performance taken into account and that is what H has done, of course its absurdly expensive and not practical in the slightest but that's is EXACTLY what ASUS is doing when they build these cards, highest performance possibly and throw everything else out the window, there is a damn reason they only make 999 of them...

Awesome review, guys, as usual ASUS delivers a stellar card and proves what can be done with a lot of hard work, only caveat is that it should have 6GB of VRAM.
 
The 6GB version should be released a month or so later for $1799 :p

Any typical purchaser of the $1500 version would not be able to tolerate being one-upped by their buddy, right?
 
Tell me when this GTX580 quad SLI is packed into a single GPU die and costs $350.

Honestly, going from 40nm to 20nm would quarter the size of the die, right? Problem solved right there. C'mon TSMC... figure this out, Intel got 22nm solved already.

</pipedreams> :rolleyes:
 
Viper87227 said:
Yeah, I saw that they acknowledged the price... but still, every other review takes cost into account when dishing out judgment. I've seen plenty where an otherwise good product was not recommended because it was too expensive. I'm not knocking the review, I have always been curios to see what these cards would do in SLI. I just don't see the card as being deserving of a gold award. Might be the fastest card, but its still incredibly impractical.
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this review had absolutely no cost put into relation of its award, it would be stupid to even do that. this is basically one of those ultimate setup reviews. something we have all wanted to see since the MARS II was announced. its bad ass enough that they were able to get their hands on not 1 but 2 of these cards to test so i'll deal with the gold award even though the setup would of cost 3 grand for the cards and another 300+ for the power supply and another 200 dollars in electricity just to test the cards.
 
I just have to give props to ASUS to giving (I'm assuming it was given, hopefully!) not just one but two of these bad boys. This is the kind of hardware pr0n I come to the [H] for. Read into that what you will. :D
 
4x MSI lighting eXtreme 3GB each :-P.....but honestly I'd get 4 watercooling rdy cards if I had that much money to do things right.
 
Thank you for publishing that article. I found it really useful. I too am not going to be purchasing one - let alone two - but as a pointer for the next generation of video cards it was excellent. I took away two basic facts:

1 - when all four chips are working, performance is much of a muchness.
2 - more VRAM!

I remember an article a while back that showed that SLI and Crossfire performance was not significantly degraded by putting the second card in a x4 slot. I don't recall them trying a x1 slot! I wonder if that still holds for these beasts?
 
Small error in the conclusion page

So we can say that in VRAM limited games, like BF3, you are going to get a smoother experience out of the Radeon HD 6970 in a Quad-GPU situation.
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If you've got that kind of dough and are shopping today, might as well wait for X79 and get four real 3GB cards for $2360? Though I have no idea about quad-SLI system building at all. One thing I can see is that cooling two of these might be easier than four individual cards smashed together.
 
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