ASUS MARS II Review: GTX 580 SLI On One PCB

Name: ASUS MARS II Geforce GTX 580 SLI
Brand: ASUS

by Marco Chiappetta — Friday, August 26, 2011, 12:01 AM EDT

Just Cause 2

DX10.1 Gaming Performance

Just Cause 2

Just Cause 2 was released in March 2010, from developers Avalanche Studios and Eidos Interactive. The game makes use of the Avalanche Engine 2.0, an updated version of the similarly named original. It is set on the fictional island of Panau in southeast Asia, and you play the role of Rico Rodriquez. We benchmarked the graphics cards in this article using one of the built-in demo runs called Desert Sunrise. The test results shown here were run at various resolutions and settings. This game also supports a few CUDA-enabled features, but they were left disabled to keep the playing field level.

Talk about a good, old fashioned, butt whoopin'. The Asus MARS II smoked every other card by a wide margin at both resolutions in the Just Cause 2 benchmark. The MARS II's closest competitor--the Radeon HD 6990 AUSUM--still finished about 17FPS behind at the highest resolution we tested.

Tags: Nvidia, Asus, GeForce, Gaming, graphics, GPU, sli, mars, GTX 580

Marco Chiappetta

Marco's interest in computing and technology dates all the way back to his early childhood. Even before being exposed to the Commodore P.E.T. and later the Commodore 64 in the early ‘80s, he was interested in electricity and electronics, and he still has the modded AFX cars and shop-worn soldering irons to prove it. Once he got his hands on his own Commodore 64, however, computing became Marco's passion. Throughout his academic and professional lives, Marco has worked with virtually every major platform from the TRS-80 and Amiga, to today's high end, multi-core servers. Over the years, he has worked in many fields related to technology and computing, including system design, assembly and sales, professional quality assurance testing, and technical writing. In addition to being the Managing Editor here at HotHardware for close to 15 years, Marco is also a freelance writer whose work has been published in a number of PC and technology related print publications and he is a regular fixture on HotHardware’s own Two and a Half Geeks webcast. - Contact: marco(at)hothardware(dot)com