Asus toys full of Far Eastern promise

ASUS HAS A TON OF TOYS on display here in Old Taipei, from the worlds smallest clamshell phone to cutting edge graphics cards. Even the chariman of Asus, Jonney Shih, dropped by to have a go with some of the games and laptops.

First up, this is Asus, so you probably want to know about motherboards. There are heaps of them - a long wall of them, in fact. Take a look, here are a few of them, a pair of i915P boards, in both 775 and 478 pin versions, and a Via PT890 one. All of them have PCI-E, and should be on the market in the near future, most likely when Intel 'surprises' us with its announcement.

The most wicked thing I saw on all the boards was Asus' 'Stack Cool' technology. What it is is another layer of PCB bolted to the back of the mobo behind the chipset. This allows more heat to be wicked away from the chipset, either reducing the need for, or eliminating the chipset fan. I am not sure what the 'AI Proactive' part is about, but more efficient cooling is never bad.

Graphics cards were no exception, and Asus did a good thing here also. The standout product by far was the V9999Ultra Deluxe, a 1 slot NVidia 6800 ultra card. While there may be other 1U 6800Ultras running around the show, I didn't see any, but I wasn't looking very hard either.

Asus also tweaked the 6800 design a bit. NVidia only puts GDDR3 on the highest end reference board, and the rest suffer with slower, hotter memory. Asus designed their own PCB and put GDDR3 on the next lower rung of NVidia cards, so you can get a non-SuperUltraDeluxeSystem (SUDS) version of the card with the good memory. If that isn't enough, it has blue LEDs on the fan that change intensity with use. Go out and but at least one now!

Another corner of the booth held Asus chairman Jonney Shih, a very happy man. If you don't think buying Asus products will make you happy also, just look at this man's face. Bliss. If you do as I said and buy MORE than one graphics card, nirvana is almost guaranteed, but read the box carefully, more than six in a 24 hour period can be bad for you.

Moving right along, there were a few laptops on display, the coolest by far is the W1N, a 15.4 inch 16*9 aspect ratio laptop. It has a subwoofer, for thumpin' bass, and a TVTuner built in. Asus claims this is the first laptop with an integrated TV tuner, a feature which raises a whole bunch of interesting possibilities. Your spokesmodel for this picture is the amicable Jonney Shih again, smiling as usual.

Overall, lots of cool toys from Asus, they are out, or will be out soon. We told you about the S-Presso SFF cases earlier, and there are lots of other neat things hiding in the corners of the Asus booth. Their R&D guys are probably cooking up even cooler stuff as you read this. Stay tuned for more. µ