ASUS caters towards enthusiasts and gamers
ASUS has announced its new Republic of Gamers series of motherboards. The Republic of Gamers (ROG) series was displayed at Computex 2006 as the Pluto concept. It will be catered towards the gaming and enthusiast crowd much like DFI’s LANParty series. Most of the features found on the Pluto concept will make it onto production ROG series motherboards. These features include the LCD Poster which is a diagnostic readout placed on the rear I/O panel. Unlike traditional debugging readouts which require users to look up a debug code, the LCD Poster displays the boot-up process and errors in full text for easier diagnostics.
Gone from the ROG series of motherboards are traditional bulky capacitors that can leak. Instead Asus has installed 8-phase polymer aluminum electrolyte capacitors similar to the capacitors used in tightly packed server motherboards. The electroluminescent rear I/O panel will also see the light of day too. A high definition audio codec will be placed on a separate riser card to reduce electrical noise. The audio riser has been named SupremeFX and is capable of 24-bit/192 KHz audio on all eight channels. It will be bundled with a stereo array microphone which supports noise canceling technologies.
All ROG motherboards will come bundled with 3DMark06 Advanced Edition. The first motherboard in this series, dubbed Crosshair, is expected to launch with Conroe this month. ASUS has issued the following bullets for Crosshair:
- AMD Socket AM2
- NVIDIA nForce 590 SLI MCP
- Dual Channel DDR2 800/667/533
- 2 x PCIe x16, support NVIDIA SLI at full x16, x16 speed
- 8 x SATA 3.0 Gb/p including two external ports / 1 x Ultra DMA
- Dual Gigabit LAN
- SupremeFX sound card featuring ADI 1988b High-Definition Audio with 8-channel surround sound
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