ASUS ROG MARS 2 3GB Video Card Review w/ NVIDIA Surround

Power Consumption

For testing power consumption, we took our test system and plugged it
into a Kill-A-Watt power meter. For idle numbers, we allowed the system
to idle on the desktop for 15 minutes and took the reading. For load
numbers we measured the peak wattage used by the system while running
the OpenGL benchmark FurMark 1.8.2 at 1280×1024 resolution.

Power Consumption Results: When it comes to limited edition flagship graphics cards most people don’t care about energy efficiency, but we had to take a peak to see how the ASUS MARS 2 uses power. We found that this card doesn’t sip power, but rather gulps it down like a gas guzzling SUV sitting in LA traffic when at full load in an application like Furmark 1.9.1. When running Furmark at 1280×1024 in extreme burn-in mode we were able to hit 792 Watts! When we dropped the resolution down to 640×480 the power draw topped out at 802 Watts! We also looked at peak power usage during games like Dirt 3 and found that the ASUS MARS 2 used 580 Watts. The AMD Radeon HD 6990 used 477 Watts during the same section of the game, so there is roughly a 100 Watt difference between the cards during gaming. At idle the ASUS MARS 2 was drawing 216 Watts at the wall, which was 48W more than the same platform with the AMD Radeon HD 6990 OC.