There are a vast majority of video cards (Graphics Processing Units) in the world, from various companies, such as MSI, Intel, Asus, and many, many more. Technology evolves constantly, with newer games with higher graphical capabilities. The latest GPU's means the latest trend in computer technology.
With an average of a new GPU coming out per every two weeks or so, it is hard to keep up with the latest power, that is until Asus officially releases their highly anticipated Mars GTX 295. Third party companies will take either an nVidia GPU or an ATI GPU and “overclock” it to their safest factory settings.
Overclocking is when you take the speed of a GPU and make it faster, faster than the default speeds. The only people that tend to do this, is enthusiast gamers who try to get the biggest bang for the buck. Overclocking to far is considered dangerous as it can damage components inside of the GPU, if you don't play it safe. Well, what a third party company will do is they will change the designs and change the default speeds to adapt to the design.
So if you want the best overclock possible, you would need a good design with heat pipes, water cooling capabilities, fans, etc. What Asus has done is just that. They have taken nVidia's GTX 295 and overclocked it extremely high. Probably one of the best third party improvements on a video card anyone has seen.
The nVidia GTX 295 was already unique as it ran as if it was a two-in-one unit. This is simply because the GPU already had 2 Processing Units (PU's) on the inside of the card. Normally cards would only have one, to get over this hunch people would buy two cards in order to have double the speed. This is called running in SLI (for nVidia cards) or CrossFire (for ATI cards).
If the cards has two PU's inside of it, then there is no need to buy another of the same card. Saving space on your motherboard, and adding more power if you were to buy another card. So if you were to have 2 GTX 295's on the same motherboard then it would be called Quad-SLI which is a very extreme setup.
The regular nVidia GTX 295 ran off from two GTX 275 PU's, which were single PU cards. The Asus GTX 295 runs off from 2 GTX 285 PU's which had 2 PU's inside of it. So it's technically like running 4 PU's but it only physically has 2 super clocked ones. Each PU also acts as memory (RAM) it has it's own “dedicated” RAM so it doesn't feed off from your system's default RAM.
This can be used for higher resolutions, and higher graphical overclocks. The GTX 275 had 896MB of dedicated RAM and the Dual PU GTX 285 had 1GB of dedicated memory per PU. But the Mars GTX 295, however, has a total 4GB of dedicated memory, 2GB per PU. Four times as much as the GTX 275.
In the end, the Asus Mars will be a high achievement in the world of computer technology. It will introduce many more powerful cards and technologies to come to the world. It will also be very high priced and collectible as there will only be 1,000 made.
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beau
