Tech Reaction

MSI and Asus were both kind enough to give us some time yesterday.  First, we headed to the MSI suite at the Wynn hotel.  MSI had many of their products on display, but the real meat was the demonstration of the new P55 Big Bang Fuzion board based off of the Lucid Hydra chip.

Big Bang Fuzion

The Big Bang Fuzion and Trinergy are essentially identical boards with the only difference being their choice of logic.  Both are P55 boards with top of the line PWM and capacitors, however the Trinergy uses the older Nvidia NF200 chip for additional PCI-E lanes, where-as the Fuzion uses the new Lucid Hydra chip.  The Lucid allows the use of both an ATI and Nvidia card at the same time, as well as the standard SLI and CrossFire solutions.

Next we headed to the Asus booth for a meeting with the very wise Gary Key.  He showed us around, starting with motherboards.  Asus had the some updated products to showcase, but Gary did make a point in mentioning that very little has changed since P55 was released and probably wouldn’t for the foreseeable future.  They did however have a revised Maximus III Extreme and Rampage III Extreme.

Rampage III Extreme

Gary explained some of the new features of this revision, including a totally new and improved PWM capable of over 260amps power delivery to the CPU.  Gary said that number could increase to as high as 300a before launch.  Another nice addition was the LN2 switch, which essentially fixes the cold boot issues by forcing the board to run in a base mode that disables all unnecessary features and bumps up voltages just for the boot process.  The BIOS is still being tuned at the moment, but Gary is expecting the board to be ready for March/April.

On the AMD side, Asus had a nice surprise in the form of the M4A89GTD PRO using what will eventually become the RD890GX chipset.  Next generation on-board graphics, SB850 southbridge with native SATA6 and USB 3.0, and improved PWM.

Asus M4A89GTD PRO

Boards will be ready in time for AMD’s desktop 6-core around April/May.  The board pictured is of course not their high-end, which would explain the poor spacing around the CPU socket area.  Gary assured me that the higher-end versions would be more enthusiast friendly both in terms of component quality/features and layout.

Lastly we have the Eee Keyboard which as the name implies, is a netbook in a keyboard.  Atom processor, 8-16GB SSD, 720P wireless output that can connect to any TV instantly.  The device uses line of sight and needs to be within 5 meters of the display for the signal to come through.  The quality was impressive and the device responsive.  The size and weight of the unit made it deceiving that it could be anything more than just a regular keyboard.  Asus really has a great product in the pipe with this one.  Gary says late Q1 or early Q2 for release and MSRP starting at $449.

Eee Keyboard