Asus launches ROG hardware controller

This actually seems like quite a cool product for those of us that want to easily and immediately oc or dc without nerding out too much.
Wlll probably be boku expensive tho...

"take overclocking to a whole new level of ease, accuracy and sophistication."

Didn’t abit's uGuru chip do exactly that about 5 years ago? Is it just a coincidence that this pops onto the market not long after Abit's demise or am i just a cynical bastard?

If ASUS is not even bothering to support their motherboards in any serious fashion how in the world do you think they are going to help you fix the thing that's having trouble overclocking your motherboard?

I would just avoid this thing if you can't handle supporting yourself.

Asus you make pretty good products... you just have no idea what to do after making them.

I guess I'm still a little peeved after my 5th RMA on a ROG Striker II Extreme.

Reasonable cynicism, because it's exactly what I thought too, I've had abit boards in my two most current systems and I was sad to hear of their demise, especially seeing as they were the only manufacturer to do anything, anything at all about the capacitor plague - everyone else just sat on their hands and pretended they didn't know anything

So what ever happened to nVidia's Enthusiast System Architecture (ESA)? I'm just curious, it was supposed to do something similar and use USB. Maybe once it was canceled by nVidia execs, an order was sent to nVidia employee to forget ESA's existence and never speak of it again. Thus, it was erased from the official "NV" version of reality. Can't wait until PhysX and CUDA meet the same fate.

Seriously though, if motherboard manufacturers hammered out a standard for system monitoring devices using the low speed, two wire SMBus, it might make more sense. SMBus is already present, available and is used on every current motherboard.

is improving, for instance I recently had a problem with a QX9650 CPU VID error on ROG Maximus Extreme and they bent over backwards to work with me to find and fix the BIOS fault which they eventually did. But it was a strange mistake to make and you wonder who is writing their ROG BIOS these days.

One problem with the impression customers receive is they have incredibly slow servers, at least from blighty they are and it makes you wonder what kind of hitech mobo company has problems finding slick hardware and a fat pipe, even if it is a long way away in China.

Also some of their ROG stuff has not gone as well as it might. As a gamer if you buy in you are hoping that they have had input from real live overclocker geeks but then you find they are using thermal gum under their cor-blimey ring 'o bling mobo heatsinks, which raises the NB 5°C, as you discover when you switch to Arctic Cooling compounds. No self respecting overclocker involved in the design would have let that pass so clearly they havent or they have other priorities which negate any justification for the price tag.

Coupled to experience and forum discussions of inherent stability issues with some ROG mobos preventing stable overclocks at the kind of clocks people get on much cheaper motherboards, it suggests the whole ROG badge is a triumph of form over function and you feel like a mug, since they aint cheap.

It feels like they hired a marketing consultant from their target market who then invented ROG and tried to get Asus who otherwise have a good reputation (with Anandtech at any rate!) for solid motherboards, to "make it happen".

......is terrible.

Why is it that Korean motherboard manufacturers state they are at the cutting edgeb of technology but all have websites that look like they were built back in 1998 and run like they are still on the servers from that time too?

Really shoddy!

This is yet another symptom of bullshit overclocking products that are designed to look good and justify the purchase of more money wasting crap rather than achieving anything sensible.

The proper way to build these systems is to use heatsinks, fans and fan controllers that maintain an overclock for several unattended hours at maximum load (CPU *and* GPU *and* hard disk) in a hot environment with a constant temperature, and that automatically controls fan speed without user intervention.

No, instead, of course it's much better to build systems that run games at full pelt for half an hour whilst cooking your components and needing someone actually at the machine to adjust fan speeds.

No doubt it will be 'scientifically tested' on a bare motherboard, rather than inside an enclosed case with cooling that's properly designed and doesn't sound like a wind tunnel when used.