Earlier this week pictures were floating around the web of ASUS’s upcomming Maximus III Formula motherboard. These are a little more exclusive and we assure you that they are very, very fresh. Specifications for the board still aren’t finalized but we will bring you that information as soon as we can.
via. TweakTown.com
While many motherboard manufacturuers are taking the time at Computex to show off motherboards based upon Intel’s P55 chipset, ASUS is showing off a little bit more.
Dubbed the P7P57 motherboard, it is based upon Intel’s P57 express chipset and is ready to support Lynnfield and Clarkdale CPUs when they arrive. ASUS didn’t shed too much light on the motherboard, but we did learn that it will support Intel’s Braidwood technology as well as dual-channel DDR3 support.
ASUS also said that the board wil have an 8-phase power design and EPU for system level energy efficiency. It is a little interesting how ASUS brags about more phases giving the board more power then immediately points out that it will be energy efficient.
via. TweakTown.com
Asus is entering the Ion market; and they are doing it in a very smart way. Not wanting to put the more expensive Ion into the common netbook (either due to Intel pressure of just for plain common sense) Asus is using the fact that Ion now supports the Celerons family as well as the Ion.
The new mainboard featuring Ion and a possible Celeron 220 was spotted by the gang over at Fudzilla. We talked to Asus about the Ion when it was first announced and nVidia wanted to stuff it into netbooks. Although Asus declined to comment on Ion at the time, we had the feeling they were not discounting it altogether.
Traditionally Ion would be for Atom only but at Computex nVidia announced that the Ion would support additional CPUs as well as Ion. This is in line with nVidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang’s statement that the MCP79/GeForce 9400 is the same thing as Ion.
The new product would be a great fit into a nettop or an HTPC as the Ion does have better video playback than Intel’s offering plus the nice ability to push out HD quality video at 1080p
Read more here.
Asus has been showing off its ION-based C2N7A-I ITX motherboard, and we’ve come across some conflicting information. ION platforms have Atom CPUs, of course, and without them they’re just plain MCP79 or Geforce 9400 chipsets, and it would seem unlikely that Asus would call its board ION if it wasn’t one.
Unfortunately, the cooling solution suggests there’s no Atom in this combination and we’ve heard that this board will actually run Celeron 220, which would automatically cancel out ION branding. However, this might be just plain speculation, as Nvidia wouldn’t allow for ION branding on a non-Atom platform.
via. TweakTown.com
ASUS Mars series Dual GPU based GTX 285 – 4GB memory.
ASUS is showing it at Computex. The card, although it retains the name ‘GeForce GTX 295′, same device ID, and is compatible with existing NVIDIA drivers, has two huge innovations put in by ASUS, which go far beyond being yet another overclocked GeForce GTX 295: the company used two G200-350-B3 graphics processors, the same ones that make the GeForce GTX 285. The GPUs have all the 240 shader processors enabled, and also have the complete 512-bit GDDR3 memory interface enabled.
This dual-PCB graphics card holds 32 memory chips, and 4 GB of total memory (each GPU accesses 2 GB of it). Apart from these, each GPU system uses the same exact clock speeds as the GeForce GTX 285: 648/1476/2400 MHz (core/shader/memory).
And of course ASUS had set it up in SLI as well… so that’s four active GTX 285 GPU cores right there… it shattered a 3DMark score.
via. Guru3D.com
Pictures of an ASUS graphics card dubbed the MARS 295 Limited Edition have made their way online, and it’s something of a monster.
Inside this big ol’ beast lies a GeForce concoction unlike anything we’ve seen thus far. Despite its 295 branding, this isn’t just a tweaked version of the GeForce GTX 295 introduced at the beginning of the year.
No sir, ASUS has opted to do something a little different and inside the MARS 295 Limited Edition, it’s sandwiching a pair of GeForce GTX 285 PCBs (printed circuit boards). That’s NVIDIA’s fastest single-GPU, doubled, and connected invisibly via internal SLI.
But why stop there? Instead of using standard 1GB cards, ASUS is using GPUs equipped with 2GB apiece, giving the MARS 295 Limited Edition a total of 4GB of GDDR3.
Two 2GB GeForce GTX 285s in one package, so that’s:
* Two 55nm GPUs clocked at 648MHz each
* A total of 480 stream processors, clocked at 1,476MHz
* 4,096MB of GDDR3 memory, clocked at an effective 2,484MHz and accessed via dual 512-bit interfaces
* 2,125 peak GFLOPS
* A peak fillrate of 41.47 Gpixel/s
Or, another way to put it, is to say it’s stupidly fast. Get really imaginative and you should be able to put two MARS 295 Limited Editions side by side for some crazy quad-GTX-285-SLI action.
We reckon we’ll see the card at next week’s COMPUTEX, but we’re in no hurry to find out pricing. The pictured card is denoted as “Limited Edition 1/1000″. We presume, then, that ASUS will be making just a limited amount, and it’ll charge a beefy premium for each and every one.
