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Asus MarsII QuadSLI Watercooled


Conker

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Those cables look amazing.

Is the dual PSU connector to turn on two PSUs at once? Are the two wires going into the auxiliary plug the ATX switch wire (aka the green wire) and a ground?

Yes exactly. The advantage of the adapter is that both power supplies start at startup. With a simple connection between the ATX switch wire and a ground the power supply will stay "always-on", when I have it correctly in mind.

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  • 4 weeks later...

That's really impressive. I know this is an old thread but instead of making full coverage blocks, have you considered my proposition of using Koolance GPU 220 blocks?

a>

The block itself will not be any thicker than the existing heatsinks which means you can still put the shroud back on with the fans in place. Put some passive heatsinks on the other modules and they can be efficiently cooled as well.

It's just an economical suggestion by me but I guess for a guy who owns two Mars II cards...

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  • 4 weeks later...
That's really impressive. I know this is an old thread but instead of making full coverage blocks, have you considered my proposition of using Koolance GPU 220 blocks?

a>

The block itself will not be any thicker than the existing heatsinks which means you can still put the shroud back on with the fans in place. Put some passive heatsinks on the other modules and they can be efficiently cooled as well.

It's just an economical suggestion by me but I guess for a guy who owns two Mars II cards...

Hey widezu

Before I started with the waterblock design process, I've thought about your method with the adjustable Koolance coolers.

However, I came to the conclusion that a full cover waterblock will be the best solution.

That is so amazing how did you get your hand on a Mars 2 especially two of them thats insane. I thought that they only made like 999 of them. What number are yours?

Hmm...I don't know the numbers, if your interested I can tell you the numbers when I'm home tomorrow.

How I got my hands on two Asus MarsII?

Well...hehe...First you have to be crazy to say you want to own one of those beasts. Then you need a colleague like @svl7, who continuously tells you that you should buy two of them. So the story began...

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It's time for an update...

The last time I was waiting for the thin copper plates to arrive. They arrived a few days after and I changed the thermal pads I used for trial before. Then I reinstalled everything into my Xigmatek Elysium case. I made another two hour Looptest to check for leaks, then I started the machine with the current Windows installation to check if the hardware and temperatures are ok. It seemed that everything was ok, so I went on and performed a clean install of Windows. When I advanced to driver installation, I noticed some fast disappearin flickerings here and there, especially after reenabling Nvidia Surround, but so far the machine was working well in quadSLI configuration.

I went on to do some benchmarking and game testing in the following days, the results were quite promising max temperatures around 50°C with a 2°C difference between the Chips on one card.

Then it happened...on the right screen rainbow-colored artifacts appeared and Windows 8 rebooted. Windows made some system checks and rebooted back to desktop. Then the Nvidia Control Panel popped up showing that my SLI configuration has changed, I checked that and it was true it was no more working in quadSLI it changed to triSLI, showing only three GTX 580s in NCP. Device Manager showed Windows Error Code 43 for one of the GTX 580 chips. After sorting out which card and chip it was, I took the card out of the system and disassembled it. There was neither no leak/water nor could I find a physical damage. I built the Asus MarsII back together and mounted it again. I tried some different things but the chip stayed marked with Windows Error Code 43, I suspect that one of the Vrams died.

However the other three GTX 580s worked flawlessly. I continued with benchmarking and overclocking and with @svl7 help, I was able to reach a stable 940Mhz core clock. I did some benchmarks, unfortunately I lost/deleted the screenshots.

The card was still under warranty, so I called the Asus Tech Support, to ask how RMA works with a limited edition item which is most-likely no more in stock. He said at best I'm getting the card back with exchanged chips and in the worst case I get the defective card back as it is. I decided to try to RMA the card...Six or seven weeks I heard nothing then I called the store to ask if they heard something, they had no information as well, but they promised me to check the status and give me an update. Two days after they called me on my mobile and told me that Asus has no idea what the RMA status is nor where the Asus MarsII is at the moment. They offered me to book the purchase price as a credit to my store account, I accepted this solution. I bought myself a Samsung 940X3G with this credit a few weeks ago.

The fully functional Asus MarsII is still in my possession, probably I'll make a smaller watercooling desktop build sometime in the future...

These are the last pics I made before I RMA'd the card:

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Did you have very uneven die pressure maybe? I wonder if that might have damaged the BGA. It's a shame the one card died, but getting full purchase price back for an older card is pretty nice.

It's hard to say, it's one possibility, it could also be that something got damaged, when I removed the IHS...many other reasons could be possible...

But yeah it's cool that i got "the money" back, I'm very satisfied with my Ultrabook I bought. :D

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  • 6 months later...

Hey guys

Some time ago or better to say, before I handed my two GTX Titans to @svl7 for some further TriSLI benches (which are still pending :rolleyes:), I ran some benchmarks on my watercooled rig comparing two GTX Titans in SLI with my Asus MarsII (GTX580s in SLI). :D:glee::cool:

Here are the results, enjoy ;):

Setup 1:

[email protected]

Asus GTX Titan@876/1502 core/memory (stock)

Asus MarsII@782/1002 core/memory (stock)

Asus MarsII@876/1002 core/memory

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Setup 2:

[email protected]

Asus GTX Titan@1156/1502 core/memory

Asus MarsII@950/1002 core/memory

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