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

I LOVE [H] and support you all in every way I can. But, I am a little taken by some of the shit that Kyle says anymore. I think the point jcollet was trying to make is that that 'though cool' cool, and 'stupidly expensive'.. Who would buy these cards? Certainly someone who sucks ass at video games and has a small you know what. Considering most all the gamers that can really kick your ass in MP spend more time playing games than at work to afford these beasts.
Cool review none the less, I appreciate all the effort, but some of the remarks made by the big KB really turns me off sometimes, my two pennies anyway. Just remember, living high on the hog is nice, but delicious bacon still comes from down low on the hog.
 
This reminds me of the old Voodo 5 5500 card with multiple GPUs on one PCB. I was wondering when someone would do so again, and no Matrox doesn't count. Are they even still around for that matter? As for the price, that's just absurd. 3dfx did mutiple GPUs and kept it affordable. I miss those days. Then again maybe their lower pricing is what killed the company. :shrug:
 
Hah. This is... *facepalm*. I've seen plenty of GT540M with 2 GB of VRAM, why not this? Silver award, not gold.
 
Thank you for the review, especially that you benchmarked a triple monitor setup. And you were not afraid to point out and investigate the VRAM bottlenecks. This is what distinguishes HardOCP from other, lesser hardware sites.
 
As a rare collectible video card would this even hold or increase it's value or will you be giving it to your neighbour in 5 years when her onboard video breaks?
 
While I like and support the high end efforts from ASUS, the gold award left me scratching my head specially when considering the shitty deal you get with 1.5GB of RAM at this price range.
 
Wow, AMD has been slacking and their drivers got PwnD in my opinion. They do a pretty good job on crossfire, decent on trifire and their quad crossfire scaling is poor at best. Many of these games are top titles that they should be absolutely watching closely and ensuring that they don't have negative scaling.. Add to the list Crysis 2 which has poor scaling and the new deus ex expansion /facepalm.

Asus on the other hand could have absolutely afforded to add the 3gb per gpu. They are not increasing the IC's just the density. The speed is even the same. The chips would cost a little more and eat into their process a little but they could absolutely add them and still make a killing on this type of product which I would have to assume the mark up is over 50% $1499 is probably $700 cost $799 Profit. So let's say 3GB per gpu would probably be $1499, $830 cost $670 profit. Yet they would have had an epic card.

I don't know about you guys but if I were to spend $3000 on video card hardware it BETTER be able to game at 3x 30 inch with some moderate AA. That's a non negotiable. Still the card is good for what it is I guess.

Both teams should work on drivers, but especially AMD. They come out with monthly updates and I'm sure they have to know about these issues. So Catalyst Creator... FIX THEM!! My boy Vega is hurting right now in BF3. ;)

Here is how to properly spend $3000 on videocard hardware

Buy 4 http://www.evga.com/products/moreInfo.asp?pn=03G-P3-1591-AR&family=GeForce 500 Series Family&sw=
 
this seems like a Silver card especially with the memory issue, Gold (if it is/should be) clear of this issue at the price it is offering.
 
Why not see how it overclocks or did I miss that in the review? Overall I am glad someone did a review on this card. I still like my HD6990 + HD6970 setup, but would love to have one of these if not two. Curious also if you can SLI it with a GTX580 to see the performance. The only downside is the shear size, it would need a custom water block to see it's true 24/7 potential IMHO. But it is a sweet card just like the Ares was.
 
All the complaining about the gold award is just silly. You have to understand how markets and capitalism work to understand why this card got a gold award. I'm a rather big fan of AMD/ATI and I still see this card as an amazing engineering feat. This is why we have competition, because each company can take an item and perfect it in their own way. The price is actually not bad for something that is, in essence, an amazing engineering feat. You're paying to own something that a dedicated group of people poured hundreds of man hours into. Later down the road when everyone is buying HD 9900s and GTX 790s etc. whatever they're gonna be called, you can afford to buy it at 3-400$, because someone was willing to figure out how to push the boundaries. Simply put, innovation drives markets to excel, and allows prices to eventually trickle down to those of us who can afford it.

Awesome review, and keep up the the no nonsense, no bs, in your face, reviews. This is why I keep coming back to this site year after year. : )
 
I wonder what could of caused the performance differences between BF3 the best looking and most demanding game and the other games. I also agree that this card being memory limited is an automatic demerit, you dont build a $500k sports car and make it RWD with an open differential.
 
At $1500, I see no reason to buy this card over the GTX 590 or 6990...Actually was seriously considering a 590 for my new SB build, until I saw the lack of vram. Went with two EVGA GTX 570s w/ 2.5gb, instead.

For what you save w/ either of the contenders, you could get a high end LC setup and overclock them (590 especially, since it's basically the same d***n thing, only downclocked) or 6990, to levels that would probably destroy this card in every way, especially price/perf. Your rig would be more pimp and you'd have saved a ton of money.
 
tricky0502 said:
is this card for anyone? at newegg you have a buy a $3500-4200 bundle to get the card and all of the combos are on out of stock. how many did asus make, 100? less? and of those how many went to reviewers?
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999 were made....like the article said.
 
Lord_Exodia said:
$1499 is probably $700 cost $799 Profit. So let's say 3GB per gpu would probably be $1499, $830 cost $670 profit.
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I doubt there is much profit involved here on such a small production run, probably.
 
Betaboy1983 said:
I LOVE [H] and support you all in every way I can. But, I am a little taken by some of the shit that Kyle says anymore. I think the point jcollet was trying to make is that that 'though cool' cool, and 'stupidly expensive'.. Who would buy these cards? Certainly someone who sucks ass at video games and has a small you know what. Considering most all the gamers that can really kick your ass in MP spend more time playing games than at work to afford these beasts.
Cool review none the less, I appreciate all the effort, but some of the remarks made by the big KB really turns me off sometimes, my two pennies anyway. Just remember, living high on the hog is nice, but delicious bacon still comes from down low on the hog.
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Feel free to put me on ignore.
 
Spartan8o5 said:
Why do they have a limit of 4 per household???
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When they came out there was such a demand for those cards that people couldn't get their hands on them for days. Their forums lit up with people wanting a way to reserve or get in a queue. People were buying them like crazy. Anyway I guess a limit of 4 keeps enough to go around until they can get a new batch of coolers installed to restock the cards.

xorbe said:
I doubt there is much profit involved here on such a small production run, probably.
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Your probably right, however I still think the profit is in the hundreds. Even $300.00 wouldn't kill them to add 3GB of ram per gpu, and make say $260.00. Although I'm being generous there as I know that it doesn't cost $1199 to manufacture and prepare the box and materials for this card. Point was that the higher density same timings/speed vram ic's wouldn't have costed much more and would have made this card a super epic card, instead of a epic card.
 
-Sn1PeR- said:
I'm glad to see some eyefinity BF3 benchmarks! That extra VRAM is looking like a must.
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Yes, at this point, I can't imagine buying a video card with less than 2Gb of ram. Judging by the way BF3 brings any current GPU to its knees in Ultra mode, however, I'm simply going to wait until the Radeon 7000/nVidia 600 series cards. I've waited this long, I can wait a few more months.
 
The practicality of the hardware aside, it was a very interesting article. Thanks for doing it.

I think the real lesson to be learned from this is, AMD still hasn't learned how to properly support their dual-GPU solutions. Given the continual hassles that 6990 drivers appear to create, I don't understand why anyone would ever opt for one over a 2x6970 setup.
 
Holy sh!t, did the lights dim in your lab when you fired 'em up....hehe.
 
Topaz said:
The practicality of the hardware aside, it was a very interesting article. Thanks for doing it.

I think the real lesson to be learned from this is, AMD still hasn't learned how to properly support their dual-GPU solutions. Given the continual hassles that 6990 drivers appear to create, I don't understand why anyone would ever opt for one over a 2x6970 setup.
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With the current state of affairs I would say I agree to a very high extent. Although it does seem like Trifire isn't too bad either. It seems things really get shaky when you go to quad. From what I've seen people with Quadfire report only 3 gpu's working at times. AMD has to fix this, Well to be honest they are behind the 8 ball now because they should have been on top of this. A new game is understandable but several games that are AAA titles months after release and broken crossfire or negative scaling in quadfire is inexcusable.
 
statikregimen said:
At $1500, I see no reason to buy this card over the GTX 590 or 6990...Actually was seriously considering a 590 for my new SB build, until I saw the lack of vram. Went with two EVGA GTX 570s w/ 2.5gb, instead.
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either way you ended up on top, 2 GTX 570's are faster then the 590. so you made the right choice instead.

but there is always a reason to buy these. it doesn't mean its the right reason or the sane reason but there is still one.


tricky0502 said:
is this card for anyone? at newegg you have a buy a $3500-4200 bundle to get the card and all of the combos are on out of stock. how many did asus make, 100? less? and of those how many went to reviewers?

http://www.newegg.com/Shopping/FailedAddtoCart.aspx?errorType=combo&item=N82E16814121470

Kyle how about your next give away you give away one of these?? the thread would hit 1000 replies in an hour.
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lol if that happened it would be the first give-away i don't post on because i sure as heck don't want to spend another 300 dollars just for a power supply to run it if i had won(which i never do :(), nor would i want to see my electricity bill after the first month.
 
Wow.

So let's see, 1200watts give or take which, to my thinking here in Houston, equals a space heater running and this doesn't include the LCD panels. So in addition to the added electrical cost of 1.2KwH @ ~$.10 for (assumed) 4 hrs gaming/day X 30 days = ~$15/month not including the additional work on your home HVAC to accomodate the new space heater in your computer room + $3000 for the SLI setup (not including the necessary PSU)

So who, if they actually have a job making enough to afford not only the cost of the gear but the cost to accomodate the heat load, has the time to actually play enough to make it worthwhile?

interesting read though to find out about the bottlenecks. I wonder what the BF3 FPS would be at the more common rez of 1920x1080. (Since I don't live in my mom's basement while earning a stipend from my family trust fund to cover my gaming habit /snark). ;)
 
Do you guys think AMD optimized their CAP profiles for only Battlefield at the expense of other games? Seems strange that BF3 is so optimized and that relatively new games like Deus Ex are unable to utilize the 6990's raw 4 GPU performance..
 
xorbe said:
I doubt there is much profit involved here on such a small production run, probably.
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Agree.

$1,500 * 999units = $1,498,500 at retail

This is less than peanuts for Asus.

Even with a +/- 30% (specialty commission speculation) = $1,048,950

This item is for a promotion & marketing. Though a very nice one.
 
If "cost was not an issue" then why the fuck would I be sitting in front of a PC playing s game when whatever it is the game is simulating I could afford to go out and do for real...

Or, say, educate some hot woman about how awesome seafood that you caught yourself, can be to eat, after you just built up an appetite by screwing all morning on the deck of your yacht...

(I don't have a yacht myself, but I have otherwise had a similar experience a couple times in the FL keys on the beach)

Since I'm stuck in a landlocked colder climate without a personal jet, I will be one of those less fortunate stuck playing my video games...

The memory of a $1500 vacation certainly outlasts a $1500 video card...

Anyway... MORE VRAM PLEASE! :p
 
mrpc9886 said:
Wow.

So let's see, 1200watts give or take which, to my thinking here in Houston, equals a space heater running and this doesn't include the LCD panels. So in addition to the added electrical cost of 1.2KwH @ ~$.10 for (assumed) 4 hrs gaming/day X 30 days = ~$15/month not including the additional work on your home HVAC to accomodate the new space heater in your computer room + $3000 for the SLI setup (not including the necessary PSU)

So who, if they actually have a job making enough to afford not only the cost of the gear but the cost to accomodate the heat load, has the time to actually play enough to make it worthwhile?

interesting read though to find out about the bottlenecks. I wonder what the BF3 FPS would be at the more common rez of 1920x1080. (Since I don't live in my mom's basement while earning a stipend from my family trust fund to cover my gaming habit /snark). ;)
Click to expand...

If it helps at all, I have a single GTX580 running at stock speeds with a 24" 1920 x 1080 monitor. I have all the settings maxed including 4xMSAA, high post processing, and HBAO. FPS is in the mid 40s to 60s. BTW, the rest of my PC is older with ABit P35 motherboard and a Q9550 processor. No need for the whole system to get upgraded if you had a good one a few years back at least in my experience so far.

Love Battlefield and have been playing the various iterations of the series since BF1942.

GO PC GAMING! :cool: Regardless of our arguments here, we can all hopefully agree that PC gaming rules!
 
Beastly card indeed, but I also disagree with the Gold Award. For the amount of money you spend on one of these they should've given each GPU 4GB of VRAM. Instead you're getting an overpriced powerhouse that's inherently gimped for nVidia Surround setups. If I could afford to pimp my rig with hardware like this, I'd rather go Tri-SLI with 3GB GTX 580's.
 
Bumrush said:
Do you guys think AMD optimized their CAP profiles for only Battlefield at the expense of other games? Seems strange that BF3 is so optimized and that relatively new games like Deus Ex are unable to utilize the 6990's raw 4 GPU performance..
Click to expand...

I wish it were that simple. The 11.9 cap 4 is also for deus ex /sigh. AMD has dropped the ball on it's quad gpu customers. Plain and simple. So from what I know so far there is a list of games that have been out for some time that have sucky scaling

The ones in this review that sucked and Crysis 2, deus ex expansion, There could be others I'm not aware of too.

BTW Hardocp didn't mention it but scaling in quad crossfire is broken in battlefield 3 as well. Vega has a thread where he noticed in quadfire that 1 or 2 gpu's aren't working at times which doesn't result in negative scaling but less scaling than you would expect. Hopefully they patch that soon, but judging from the fact that scaling is so bad in games that are 6 months old I'm sure that we can all only hope and pray. Anyway let me stop my rant before they purposely fuck up crossfire scaling on 2x cards just to spite me :p
 
'However, even 2GB per GPU is not enough in our opinion, especially with BF3. For this game, we think the key to performance at high resolution, multi-display, multi-GPU configurations is going to be at least 3GB of available RAM per-GPU. There is no question we have much more testing to do in BF3, and we are just getting started on further evaluating this game.'

oh no!! Sounds like you have to test those godawful 3GB 580s in SLI/Tri/Quad, for hours, then retest the 1.5GB version (for correlation value), surround...weeks of work;);).....:cool:
 
The VRAM issue is why I went with 3gb GTX580's for my Tri-SLI rig. I tried it with the original 1.5gb versions, and it choked at 5760x1200. Now it's glass-smooth.

I'm amazed that this highly priced card doesn't come with 3gb framebuffers. You'd be much better off getting 3 GTX 580's with the full 3gb VRAM.
 
HohnyF said:
:eek:


ROFL


To OMG NEED MORE VRAM ppl....
Where the hell would u put 3GB of additional VRAM

asus-mars-inside.jpg
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Hohny, You would replace the chips 12 total (for each gpu) each being 128MB a piece for 12 new ones that are each 256MB. The exact same way it's done on the 3GB GTX 580. Your not going to ADD any additional chips. You are simply REPLACING the chips there with chips that have 2x the density. Also if you read my post, I mentioned that the chips that are 2x the density (256MB instead of 128MB) running at the same timings and frequency, cost only slightly more than the 128MB variants. We're talking maybe $5 more per chip.
 
I wonder how 3x MSI GTX 580 Lightning Xtreme 3gb cards, if overclocked would fare against 2x Mars IIs?

It might give it some good competition and perhaps even win, especially where 3gb of VRAM is useful.
 
hyperion0101 said:
I wonder how 3x MSI GTX 580 Lightning Xtreme 3gb cards, if overclocked would fare against 2x Mars IIs?

It might give it some good competition and perhaps even win, especially where 3gb of VRAM is useful.
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Yes I'd imagine so. You would have to turn down the AA settings on the more expensive quad GPU setup to compete with the cheaper 3x 3GB GTX 580s :eek:
 
It'd be cheaper (although at the price point's we're talking about, saving money isn't on the priority list) for 3 Lightning Xtremes, plus I imagine they could each overclock further. Apparently, there hasn't been a Lightning Xtreme that hasn't been able to meet at least 940 MHz - many go over 1,000 with a bit of extra voltage too and stable on Furmark.

All speculation at this point and all, unfortunately, out of my budget. Although even if I had the funds, at this point, it makes little sense ... the next gen is around the corner.


On thing I am interested to know is how a quad-crossfire of an "ARES" version of the 6990 would have turned out, especially compared to the MARS II. The 6990s managed to hold pretty well, all things considered.

Not to mention, these MARS II cards are heavy - the heaviest GPUs by far I've every held. They are so heavy that I am worried that it will put stress on the motherboard; apparently they come with placeholders so that you can distribute the pressure among the other 2 unused PCI-E slots next to the card; even then I'm nervous.
 
hyperion0101 said:
It'd be cheaper (although at the price point's we're talking about, saving money isn't on the priority list) for 3 Lightning Xtremes, plus I imagine they could each overclock further. Apparently, there hasn't been a Lightning Xtreme that hasn't been able to meet at least 940 MHz - many go over 1,000 with a bit of extra voltage too and stable on Furmark.
Click to expand...

I have never been able to overclock my pair of gtx 580 Lightning Xtremes above 875 MHz at the stock voltages. Could something be wrong with my cards or the Mobo?
 
Nvidia_ATI said:
I have never been able to overclock my pair of gtx 580 Lightning Xtremes above 875 MHz at the stock voltages. Could something be wrong with my cards or the Mobo?
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Something tells me that the 940MHz minimum oc claim is probably not true. Did someone actually attempt to collect that data from every single owner? 103MHz headroom (a healthy 13.3%) sounds good to me at stock voltage.
 
Lord_Exodia said:
Hohny, You would replace the chips 12 total (for each gpu) each being 128MB a piece for 12 new ones that are each 256MB. The exact same way it's done on the 3GB GTX 580. Your not going to ADD any additional chips. You are simply REPLACING the chips there with chips that have 2x the density. Also if you read my post, I mentioned that the chips that are 2x the density (256MB instead of 128MB) running at the same timings and frequency, cost only slightly more than the 128MB variants. We're talking maybe $5 more per chip.
Click to expand...

yeah , you're right.

also it's a step back kinda,

because ASUS MARS 295 Limited Edition has 4GB
 
xorbe said:
Something tells me that the 940MHz minimum oc claim is probably not true. Did someone actually attempt to collect that data from every single owner? 103MHz headroom (a healthy 13.3%) sounds good to me at stock voltage.
Click to expand...

I don't have the link, but somebody did collect the data for about a couple of hundred of the Xtreme Editions. The lowest ones were 940 MHz. Idk then... perhaps I spoke too soon? They were (mostly) using the stock cooler.
 
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