The ASUS ROG MARS II Limited Edition video card brings true dual-GeForce GTX 580 GPUs to the table. Take two of these and you can have a true GTX 580 Quad-SLI system. We’ll dive into performance, including Battlefield 3, and see what these can do directly compared to 4-way CrossFireX.

What we are about to show you today is hands down the most epic video card we’ve had the pleasure to show you in recent memory. ASUS is no stranger to making custom video cards. ASUS has a keen eye for taking what AMD and NVIDIA provide, and pushing those GPUs to the extreme building customized video cards around those GPUs. We’ve evaluated several high-end custom ASUS video cards this year that have proven to do exactly what these claimed to do. We didn’t think it could get any better than the ASUS ROG MATRIX GTX580 Platinum video card we evaluated this summer, but it has.

The ASUS ROG MATRIX GTX580 Platinum video card used a GeForce GTX 580 GPU, but took it to the max by giving us feature after endless feature designed to take the GPU to its highest potential of performance. We experienced performance over 1GHz out of that GPU, taking it to frequencies we’ve never played at before on a GeForce GTX 580. ASUS wasn’t done. What better, after this video card, than to release another one that takes the GTX 580 to a whole new level, again.

ASUS is giving us two GPUs on a single printed circuit board, in the form of a single video card. Say hello to the ASUS ROG MARS II video card. It may not sound so special until you find out that it is being done with two GeForce GTX 580 GPUs clocked at normal frequencies, something even NVIDIA shied away from. NVIDIA attempted a dual-GTX 580 video card, but ended up giving us the less-than spectacular GeForce GTX 590 video card. There were some performance issues with the GeForce GTX 590 that kept it from being competitive with two GeForce GTX 580 video cards with SLI enabled. The GPUs on the GTX 590 were severely down-clocked from GTX 580 specifications. A GeForce GTX 580 runs at 772MHz core and 1544MHz shader. Each GPU on the GTX 590 runs at 607MHz core and 1215MHz shader. On top of that NVIDIA also down-clocked the memory by 600MHz. Boo, hiss.

• READ MORE (Source): HARDOCP – Introduction – ASUS ROG MARS II GTX 580 Quad SLI Video Card Review