Nearly one year later, ASUS return to Atomic HQ with a bundle of never-before-seen tech.
We've got a pretty great relationship with ASUS here at Atomic, so when we noticed it was almost a year since ASUS came to visit, we invited them back to give us the latest news about what they're up to.
They've definitely been very busy over the past year, and the first piece of tech they brought with them was the Crosshair IV Extreme - a 890FX mobo that comes with all of ASUS' neatest features.
It's packed with their Core Unlocker that works with the Phenom II X4 960T and can make it into an X6, an 8-phase analogue power delivery, the ASUS 'Turbo Unlocker' mode that sort-of emulates Intel's processors up to 200MHz speed boost, and finally, the Lucid Hydra chip.
While the Hydra does add significant expense, ASUS engineers reckon it offers a 1-4% performance increase in same-card Crossfire, and also allows SLI on a very AMD motherboard.
ASUS also demonstrated their ROG series overclocking software, which allows complete hardware control of an external system using either a Laptop (via USB cable) or a phone (via Bluetooth).
Topping off this incredible demonstration of hardware, ASUS brought along a very early engineering sample of their Ares graphics card - featuring two full 5870 cards packed into a single board.
Unlike the 5970 that is closer to two 5850 cards, the Ares throws 4GB of memory and two fullsize RV870 cores underneath nearly six kilograms of copper heatsinks on a PCB that breaks ATX height specs and fills out sideways to three expansion slots - impressively cooled by a 120mm fan.
We'd like to thank ASUS for coming along and showing off their gear to our loyal Atomicans, and also for the prizes that they donated on the night. Jump into the gallery of pics to see how the night turned out!
Issue: 133 | February, 2012