Abit's Guru Clock saves time for overclockers

WHEN I WAS AT COMPUTEX, I was quite glad I stopped by the Abit booth. I thought I saw all the new Fatal1ty toys at E3, but I wasn't prepared for the two goodies I saw. These two things, apart from the usual mobos galore, were the Guru Clock and the Thecus.

The Guru Clock is a potential solution to the heat sensor problem I ranted about a while back and is an external USB readout and controller. It has styling vaguely reminiscent of the St. Louis Arch, and a large LCD readout, which is the big black square in the picture. The clock starts out by simply being a real clock and room tempature monitor. From there, it shows you fan speeds, various component temps, and even provides e-mail notification.

There are three buttons on the top on the readout, power, menu and select. Power is a remote PC power button, while menu lets you pick a function, select lets do it. You can chose what to display on the clock, change your overclocking settings, and a host of other handy features.

If Abit opens up the application programming interface (API) for this, there could be a host of really interesting things in store. A device like this is cool, but if you need three of them, one for each part of the computer that you have a sensor on, it is little better than the front panel displays. Scratch that, is is simply cooler, but six of them still lack elegance.

The Thecus is a completely different animal. It is a set top box, Media Center PC, and a bunch of other things all rolled into one. The one I saw was a little rough around the edges, but it worked, and there is plenty of time to polish it before the late summer launch.

It is more than the standard set top box, but since the specs are still in flux a bit, I can't say how much more. The nice part is that it has two HD bays, probably runs Linux, has a multi-card reader built in, wireless LAN, and lots of standard PC and AV ports on the front and back.

Where it really stands out is the LCD screen on the front and a built in web server. The LCD does not take much explaining, it shows you pics and movies before you turn the TV on, a slick preview feature in addition to the obvious readouts of status and things.

The other cool thing it has is the web server. Anything on the box can be shared with friends and family. Take a bunch of vacation pictures? Want to blackmail large semiconductor manufacturer execs? Put the memory card in the Thecus, press a button, and they come up on the screen like a bunch of other similar devices.

Then it asks you if you want to share it to the web. Bingo, magic. It is one of the 'why didn't anyone else think of this a long time ago' type rhetorical questions. It is so simple, so elegant, so right, that I think I want one. I can see problems, mainly the fact that it may be dumbed down enough to be annoying to any real geek, but it is a lot easier than making thumbnails and firing up Dreamweaver.

Both of these things are not 'core' ABIT products, but damn I liked them. It just goes to show that you should go everywhere at Computex, the cool stuff is often hidden away. µ