Asus Mars 760 Review: Two GPUs In SLI; One $650 Graphics Card

Features
By Don Woligroski
published

We like the idea of two GK104 GPUs in SLI on one graphics card. Sounds like a GeForce GTX 690, right? Except that board costs $1000 and Asus' Mars 760 sells for $650. In a world with sub-$700 GeForce GTX 780 Tis, can this dual-GPU stunner still impress?

Results: Metro: Last Light, 5760x1080

Metro is a similarly-taxing title. To get it running well across three monitors, we dropped the detail preset from Very High to High and turned off tessellation.

Once again, when we're able to benchmark using FCAT, the dual-GPU Radeon-based configurations are reduced to unplayable frame rates.

The rest of the field yields stronger performance.

The Radeon HD 7950 Boost cards in CrossFire suffer horrible spikes in frame time variance; the Radeon HD 7990 doesn't do much better. In fact, these numbers take us all the way back to September of last year, when a crowd of game enthusiasts blindly singled out the GeForce GTX 690 for delivering a smoother experience than AMD's former flagship in Radeon HD 7990 Vs. GeForce GTX 690: The Crowd Picks A Winner. Almost five months later, and we're still waiting for AMD to resolve those issues.

With that said, even the GeForce GTX 690 registers some variance, while Asus' Mars 760 runs smoothly. 

Don Woligroski
55 Comments Comment from the forums
  • AMD Radeon
    i would like to see dual GTX 780 Ti in one card
    Reply
  • vinhn
    @AMD Radeon, everyone would like to see it, not everyone would buy it, the market knows that, there's a reason why they would rather release the dual 760 rather than a 1600$ dual 780 Ti.
    Reply
  • Immaculate
    Why an i5-2550K?
    Reply
  • blackmagnum
    Bring on the Kepler cards already.
    Reply
  • vertexx
    I'm not sure why you would even publish this review without a 780ti in the comparison.
    Reply
  • Shneiky
    It was actually disappointing that there was no regular 760 SLI in there. It would have helped to see if the Asus's solution gives better results then regular 2 760s.
    Reply
  • bemused_fred
    Looking at the way that various card configurations bounce around in the charts, with the ranking of cards varying from page to page, the only thing I'm taking away from this article is not to bother with dual-GPU set-ups. It seems their performance is entirely decided by how well-optimised the games are for Nvidia or AMD, and not their actual specs.
    Reply
  • Raheel Hasan
    Too high price only $30 below 780ti, it should be around $550.
    Reply
  • Adroid
    I'm confused why the 780 and 770 aren't shown here - especially since the 780 is at the same price point.
    Reply
  • Au_equus
    without the gtx 780 ti, you are missing half the article, as ASUS, according to the price, was presenting this card as an alternative to the 780 ti at its price/performance. I stopped reading after the first BM.
    Reply