Its big, its black, and it lights up red and its made by ASUS. ASUS is a company known for making some of the best and most dependable components and with their reach covering motherboards, soundcards, cases, power supplies, and video cards, its no surprise they took the next logical steps and made their own desktop.
DTS is a fairly well respected company when it comes to making audio sound good, so hopefully their new partnership with on of the world’s largest motherboard manufacturers can make the current state of affairs better. The two technologies, DTS Connect, and DTS Surround Sensation, are both to be integrated into the motherboards.
Maingear is a new company to me, but apparently they make boutique, one off custom gaming PC’s. Word on the streets is they are pretty good at it too since NVIDIA entrusted them to make the computers that they sent around to the press to show off their new 3-way SLI system.
There are two, the P5E3 Premium WiFi-AP @n, and the Rampage Formula motherboard. They both feature the X48 chipset with the ICH9R Southbridge and Intel Fast Memory access, they both also accept Core 2 Extreme, Core 2 Quad, and Core 2 Duo processors, they both have dual gigabit Ethernet, 8-channel HD audio, and system bus’ up to 1600MHz as well as DDR3 support.
Many companies went green last year, and Asus is being more innovative on their Green initiative. Asus’s new P5E3 Premium motherboard uses a new solution to make it more energy efficient – this solution is called ASUS EPU (Energy Processing Unit).
So it looks like SlashGear just got their first MacBook Air, although I don’t foresee Vincent taking it apart anytime soon, at least not to this extent. So instead we have the pics from the folks over at iFixit as they slowly take apart the computer.
Once you get the initial bottom cover and battery off, everything else seems to be object oriented. What I mean by that is that there is the motherboard, but from there on, everything else is broken down into modules based on what they do, and then they all just connect to the motherboard.
With this new chipset you’ll see the C73 northbridge and the MCP55 southbridge chipset. As far as what that means, it means the motherboard will be able to support up to a 1600MHz front side bus.
For those that don’t know, eSATA is a version of the SATA connector that works externally, allowing you the same speeds of an internal drive with all the hassle of USB, except it requires a separate power cord. Bus powered refers to ability to transfer the necessary amount of power to operate the drive over the single connection, much like a lot of the newer bus-powered external USB hard drives.
This is about as cutting edge as I’ve seen a motherboard in a long time, lets start with the fact that it supports the Intel Yorkfield CPUs. From there we’ll move on to the 3-way SLI capability (can’t you see the 3 PCIe x16 slots?) and the 1333MHz FSB speed.
To do this you need 5 things, the first, an nVidia nForce 850 SLI MCP motherboard, 3 8800 GTX or Ultra cards and a near endless budget to afford all of that. So, up until now, you had your choice of dual-card SLI or quad-SLI, the latter was really just a dual-card SLI setup, but with 2 double cards, now you have the choice of 3 cards.
JP
