Nvidia Asus Mars 3

Computex, one of the hardware industry's biggest events, has seen it's fair share of big reveals this year.

The biggest, however, is probably the Asus Mars III. It's basically a GTX 690 on steroids. Full details have yet to be released but we do know a considerable amount already...

For starters, the Mars III is two GTX 680 GPUs on one PCB, totaling in 3072 CUDA cores and 64 ROPs. Furthermore, each GPU has 4GB of GDDR5 VRAM on a 256-bit bus, so the whole card totals in 8GB of VRAM on a 512-bit bus. It will also have an aggressive factory overclock, but we don't know how much of one yet.

This all comes at a price though. The power that the Mars III gets comes from three 8-pin power connectors. All in all, that's 525 watts of power. For comparison, the now discontinued GTX 480 draws 300 watts total. Some of this massive power goes to the three axial fans that attempt to keep the card cool. That's a lot of hot air though blowing directly into the case housing it.

Pricing hasn't been revealed yet, but expect it to come in somewhere north of US $1300. It will also only be available in limited quantities. Expect it to hit the market in the coming weeks.