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ASUS ROG MARS 760 Review

Published by Christian Ney on 19.11.13

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The card

Next to the specifications, there is something else that is impressive about this graphics card. The looks and quality of the used materials are astonishing. First of all, it does come with an aluminium backplate to prevent bending and it also protects crucial components from potential damage. Another cool design element is the MARS LED light on the side. Now let's have a look at the cooler itself. To be quite honest, this thing is of such a high quality we have not ever seen or had anything similar in our lab that could actually be compared to this one. The face-plate features a coating that is very similar to the one you can find on ASUS ROG gaming notebooks and it gives the card a matte, velvety touch. This is really high-class stuff and we would love to see this also on other ROG VGAs or maybe even some high-end motherboards.

ASUS decided to equip their ROG MARS 760 with their very own cooling solution from the DirectCU II series. The ROG MARS 760 features two separate cooling units each with four 6mm copper heatpipes in direct contact with the GPUs and each cooled by a 90mm fan. The fans are manufactured by FirstD and carry the model number FDC10H12S9-C.

The cooler also features an aluminium frame which is used to fix the cooler to the PCB and also to cool most memory chips and all MOSFETs via thermal pads. The thermal paste used is soft, of good quality and hasn't been spread uselessly in large quantities.

No surprise here, the MARS 760 uses a custom PCB where the power design is placed between the two GPUs, in the center of the PCB. ASUS went for a 12-phase power design implementation where each GPU get 5 phases and each memory side get one phase. Component wise, the MARS complies with ASUS Super Alloy Power standard.

Checking the voltage regulation chip we found two digital multi-phase controller labelled Digi+ VRM ASP1212 (probably a rebranded CHiL 8318) for the GPU and memory voltage regulation, one controller for each side.