 Here we have a very special unboxing of a very limited edition card. That's right, even more limited edition than the GTX 590, which is very, very hard to find these days, features two GTX 580 GPUs. But the GTX 590 has those GPUs underclocked in order to meet the thermal and power targets of that particular product, as well as to increase the yields. On the one that I have with me here today, no such thing has been done. This is not a GTX 590, because unlike the GTX 590, this not only has all of the CUDA cores enabled, but it is running at full GTX 580 clock speeds, which makes it more of a GeForce GTX 580 SLI. But it's still on a single card. This is the MARS II from ASUS. This is a Republic of Gamers branded product, and it better be for the price point. It has PhysX, 3D Vision, including 3D Vision Surround, because it has dual GPUs. It supports NVIDIA CUDA, as well as NVIDIA SLI. Yes, in theory, you could run two of these monsters on a single motherboard in quad SLI with four GPUs. Let's open this bad boy up and have a look at what ASUS has to say for themselves about it. So they're saying it is 22% faster than the GTX 590. Okay, with 3GB of GDDR5 memory, that's 1.5GB per GPU. It supports their GPU tweak utility, which allows you to adjust the core memory clocks, core voltage, and fan speeds. It features a direct CU2 cooler, which apparently uses two 12cm, two 120mm fans for 600% more airflow than a generic GTX 590. It also has 21 phase power delivery, which allows it to deliver 15% performance boost with a 2.5x longer lifespan and 35 degree cooler operation. Pretty neat. Alright, let's go ahead and flip this over, see if there's anything that they have on the back that they do not have on the front. Aha! Minimum recommended system power is no less than 1000 watts. Now that's a little absurd, there's no way this card pulls 1000 watts of power. In fact, even with two of them in a system, you could probably power it with 1000 watt power supply. So I wouldn't worry too much about that. It requires two 8-pin power cables. It has a maximum resolution, 25%... Aha! There's the engine clock. So 782MHz and then 4GHz on the memory with 3GB of RAM. Let's go ahead and get this opened up and have a look at the card you've all been waiting to see. Since you pressed the button to watch this video. Oops. That's all good. It's just the box. If I ripped the card, then we'd be having a different conversation. Alright, this thing is huge! Although I've come to expect that from ASUS Republic of Gamers graphics cards. Sure, we're going to do the old iPhone size comparison. You know what, why don't we hold off until just a couple more minutes until we have a chance to take the card out. So here's a little custom engraved serial number thing. Maybe it's a sticker. No, it's not a sticker. This document certifies that the limited edition Mars 2 is a unique work of art designed by the ASUS ROG team. Right there. So this is number 536 of 999. That is how many of these cards were produced worldwide. So there are not very many of them in existence. Adapters included. We've got a couple of dual 6-pin to 8-pin power adapters. Honestly though, if you don't have a proper power supply, do not buy this graphics card. Or buy this graphics card and also buy a power supply. Right here. This exclusive ASUS PCIe sustainer for the Mars 2 ensures a perfect fit and increased stability to protect the integrity of your motherboard and PCI Express 2.0 slot. Okay. Oh, neat. Okay, so you take this and you put it on the third, one, two, three, the third PCIe or PCI slot and what it does is it keeps the card, okay, you know what, I'll explain it once I have the card in my hand because that will be easier but that's cool. Okay, we have an SLI bridge. We have a DVI to VGA adapter although honestly if you're running a VGA monitor in this graphics card then get with the program. Okay, let's go ahead and, did I say two PCIe 8-pin connectors? Because I meant three I guess. Okay, we've got some documentation here. Okay, we have a Republic of Gamers sticker as well as a driver and manual and a speed setup so a quick start guide I guess is what they mean by that. And finally the graphics card itself. So first things first, let's do the iPhone size comparison. So there's the, you know what, it's as thick as an iPhone is wide so that is a triple slot card. Alright, we're going to go ahead and lay it down gently. Whoa, it's heavy. Okay, so there's the size compared to an iPhone. This is a very, very long graphics card. Alright. This is also significantly taller than a normal graphics card so honestly I don't even know where to start with this thing. Yeah, let's do the GTX 590 size comparison. So if we take the GTX 590 and lay it on top of it, remember GTX 590 is a big card. Actually I'll be back in a sec, I want to show you one other one. Alright so there it is with the 590 but I realize the 590 is so much smaller that it just dwarfs it. So I'm going to go ahead and take the largest graphics card that I have, this is a Radeon 6990 and you can see that it is even longer than a Radeon 6990. So before you even consider putting one of these cards in your system, make sure you have enough, oh yeah, you know what, not just length, but make sure you have enough height clearance like if you have a side fan or something like that, you might end up having to move it unless you have a very, very large case. So oh my goodness, it's actually really heavy. So why don't we start with the front of the card. So we've got our dual 120mm fans, now these are not wussy 120mm fans, these are case fans, these are not like slim ones, look at the size of the hubs on them. So these are going to be blowing air downward onto the heat pipes, okay, the heat pipe fins here and then further down onto the PCB. So each GPU is actually cooled by one, two, three, four heat pipes, can you see those heat pipes in there? Alright, so those are drawing heat away from the GPU itself up into the fins and then you can see there's actually two separate heat sinks that are mounted directly onto the GPUs themselves. So here you can see the other heat pipes right there and then the other heat pipe fins and then in the middle there's actually a total separation between those two units. So the way they're assembling this card is they're in all likelihood attaching those top two and then they're fitting the shroud over top of it, so the shroud fits here onto the back plate, so the back plate goes on, okay that screws into those heat sinks, okay, and then you're screwing this shroud on and then finally you're attaching the aluminum, this looks like, how many pieces of aluminum is this? Okay, it's a couple different pieces but this is basically one, two, three, four, five, six pieces of aluminum all fitted together and then attached to that shroud just to make it more of a sort of work of art really than just a functional graphics card. So let's have a look at the back of it. Alright on the back you see we have a back plate which says Republic of Gamers Mars 2, which is oriented correctly so that once the card is installed in your case you will be able to read it on the top, you've also got your serial number on there as well, you've got most of the power delivery and some RAM and what nots is all located on the back of the card but you can't really see them because of the back plate. It uses a standard PCI Express 2.0 16x slot and also uses a standard SLI connector. That's about the only thing about this card that is standard. Moving along to the top, actually here I'm going to keep it oriented this way, sorry guys this thing is so heavy it's actually really hard to hold. Okay we've got Republic of Gamers Mars 2, we've got a splitter here so both of our fans are running off 4-pin PWM power, we've got our limited edition and then four PCI Express 8-pin connectors, yes four. We've also got like a turbo fan speed button here so we can ramp those fans up to 100% speed just with the touch of a button if you don't want it to be automatically managed and you want to overclock as much as possible. Let's move around to, let's look at the back of the card, we haven't really done that yet so at the back we've just got some holes in the shroud and that's pretty much it. There's not really much to cool back there because I don't know if you guys noticed this but check this out, the card actually ends here, see that's the end of the PCB so this extra bit here doesn't really have much functional purpose which is interesting. Okay let's move around to the bottom. So at the bottom you can see we've got a lot of room for airflow to come off the card so it looks like what ASUS is intending is for these 120mm fans to be blowing air out the top of the card as well as the bottom of the card, the back of the card and the other more different back of the card so I guess that's the front of the card. So that's going to give your motherboard some cooling, okay just some incidental airflow coming off the card, you can actually see some of the RAM chips down here as well and finally let's move around to the back. So in terms of our display options we have DVI DVI, we have HDMI and we have Displayport. Now ASUS hasn't specifically called out support for 3D Vision Surround so you know what maybe if someone knows if it supports it go ahead and post in the comments but my guess would be that it does support it but you would probably have to use DVI DVI Displayport. Yeah I'm not sure, actually yeah someone post in the comments let's see what you guys know. Oh here's an interesting one, if you are planning to use two Mars IIs for quad SLI the Rampage 3 Extreme or Rampage 3 Extreme Black Edition is required. This is recommended for the best performance by a dual 16x PCIe and the best cooling operation because remember with a triple slot card you're going to need a fair number of slots in between your two 16x slots in order to make both of the cards fit in your system. So other than that you know what let's just do a couple more shots of this. So yeah we'll just take a little bit more footage of it and actually I forgot to tell you guys what these little stoppers were for. So these little stoppers go on the slots next to the Mars II so that the weight of the Mars II doesn't cause unnecessary strain on the PCI Express slot that it is installed in. So I'll show you how that would work. So you would go ahead and you would install the stoppers on this slot right here and then you install the Mars II into this slot and see how that weight is going to pull down. Well that stopper keeps it from flexing so much. So that's the thinking behind those little black strips. So I think that's pretty much it. Thank you for checking out my unboxing of the Mars II from ASUS and don't forget to subscribe to Linus Tech Tips for more unboxings, reviews, and other computer videos.