With the new Mars Limited edition ASUS presents us the fastest graphics card for gaming and enthusiasts. And therefore they had to design a completely new cooler fitting the design we already know from the GeForce GTX 295. This new cooler also has to be able to cope with much more dissipation power from the GPU because these are clocked just way higher than the ones on the reference GeForce GTX 295. Furthermore the card is limited to thousand pieces worldwide which will make this piece of hardware exclusive from the very beginning. What it does show once more is that ASUS is really thinking out of the box and being very innovative to come up with something to rule their competitors. - OcaHolic

ASUS GeForce GTX 295 Mars Limited Edition Preview

ASUS equipped the Mars Limited with 4GB of GDDR3 memory which is 2GB per GeForce GTX 285 chipset. The 0.77ns memory can be clocked up to 2600MHz. Even with the memory, ASUS pushes the borders. Therefore their Mars is the first card which comes with 2GB per GPU and as a consequence of putting two GeForce GTX 285 around one cooler is that ASUS had to modify their cooler for the Mars heavily. The dissipation power these two cards are able to generate are also much higher then everything that has been on the market before. But not only the cooling solution is different, as there are other changes as well.

ASUS also equipped the Mars with a digital 12-phase power design which makes a huge difference to the analog 6-phase power design you can find on a GeForce GTX 295. Designing a card which is based on two GeForce GTX 285 chipset, but only comes with one cooling block, one of the biggest problems you will end up with, is an adequate cooling solution. So compared to the GeForce GTX 295 they overworked the cooler completely. Now you get eight heatpipes with two copper base plates transport the dissipation power directly to the heatpipes from where it goes to the numerous fins and paired up with a powerful radial fan.

Now clearly the Mars Limited will be the fastest card on the market when it gets available. With over 25k points in 3DMark Vantage extreme presets it surely will take time until another card will throw it from the throne. That the card is limited to thousand pieces worldwide makes it exclusive from the beginning but probably so much exclusivity will have its price. At last we would like to guess at about exactly this point. If you take the price of two recent GeForce GTX 285's you will end up with about $299. If we now add a juicy bonus and also 2GB more memory we could image a price of $999 which fits perfectly to such a mostrous card.