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| World Exclusive: ASUS Crosslink |
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Last night in our Pre-Computex coverage, we saw that ASUS had some interesting looking displays set up at the front of their booth, but they were covered up and we weren’t able to take a close look at what was underneath.
Today, we were able to dig a little deeper into ASUS' booth, however, and hiding in one display was their new Crosslinx-enabled Republic of Gamers motherboards. Crosslinx is going to be featured on a couple of P35-based motherboards to enhance their PCI Express lane configurations for optimal performance in a multi-GPU configuration.
At the heart of Crosslinx is an IDT PCI Express switch, similar to the one used on the P5W64-WS. It takes the 16 lanes of PCI Express connectivity from the P35 northbridge and splits them among two PCI Express x16 slots when two graphics cards are installed. If you remember, P35 boards - like the P965 - don't have a flexible PCI Express lane configuration like the 975X and the second PEG slot on most P35 boards gets it PCI Express connectivity from the southbridge. By using a switch in this manner, Asus is able to keep both graphics cards connected to the northbridge's PCI Express lanes and keep the 4 lanes integrated into the southbridge free for other peripherals. As you can see in the screen captures in the images above, Asus claims their ROG boards using Crosslinx will have a marked performance advantage over "stock" P35-based solutions.
Also on display was ASUS watercooling product, the Asus Blitz Extreme. The Blitz Extreme is an external GPU cooler that has a digital readout of temperatures and voltages to make your graphics card overclocking easier. You may also notice in a couple of the images that Asus has incorporated 2GB of DDR3 RAM right onto a motherboard, and it's cooled by a large set of heatsinks and heat-pipes. We're not sure on the specifics of this setup because there were no English-speaking representatives in the booth at the time we snapped these images, but we'll follow up with more information when we have it. |
| ASUS X38 and RD790 Motherboards |
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We were also able to take a look at a few ASUS motherboards, including their ASUS P5E-VM D0, an Intel Q35 based Micro-ITX motherboard. Their P35 variant, the P5K Deluxe was also on display. ASUS is also coming out with an Intel G35 based motherboard, the P5E-VM, which like the P5E-VM D0, is based on a Micro-ITX form factor.
Also on display was the ASUS P5E3 WS Professional, based on the Intel X38 chipset and with the ICR9R
On the AMD front, ASUS was showing off their RD790 based M3A32-MVP Deluxe. As you can tell, the M3A32-MVP Deluxe looks to be the new flagship board for ASUS, with the board featuring a unique heatsink heatpipe design that actually surrounds your memory modules and helps to dissipate their heat. It will be interesting to see the types of memory overclocks that will be possible when the M3A32-MVP Deluxe hits store shelves later this year.
ASUS was also showing off their full line of graphics cards, including their dual slot Radeon 2600XT Graphics card. It has 256MB of DDR4 memory, a GPU clock of 800MHz and memory clock of 1.1GHz. |
| MSI RX2600: Dual Radeon 2600 Pro Graphics Card |
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At the MSI booth, we had the opportunity to take a close look at the RX2600 Geminium, a dual GPU Radeon 2600Pro graphics card! It has a clock speed of 800MHz and memory speed of 1400MHz, which 1GB of DDR3. The card supports HDMI and has uses heat pipe technology, but we were not able to see if it needs active cooling on the back of the card. MSI said that although the card is currently two Radeon 2600 Pro graphics cards in one, with a little extra cooling, a model with two Radeon 2600XT chips would be possible.
Also on display was MSI’s RX2600XT Diamond, Radeon 2600XT card from MSI. The RX2600XT has a core clock of 800MHz, 256MB of DDR4 memory, and a memory clock of 2200MHz.
Surprisingly, we could not find any X38 based motherboards at the MSI booth. But the company did display two G33 based motherboards, the G33 Platinum and the G33 Neo.
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