SuperFly03

Ah, Asus. You and I have a long history. It all started back in 2003 when I built my first computer back in the Northwood days. Ironically, my girlfriend still runs a Northwood but that’s another story.

Asus had a solid booth setup which covered the breadth of their lineup from netbooks to gaming laptops and from motherboards to graphics cards. One of the more interesting motherboards on display was a new X58 motherboard with native USB 3.0 support. However, the USB isn’t piped through the onboard PCI-e bus but through a 3rd party chip. The reason this is important because traditionally when USB 3.0 runs on the onboard PCI-e bus and you run Crossfire or SLI the 3.0 port will revert back to USB 2.0 spec and you are not capped at ~35MB/s throughput. It may sound trivial but is a very subtle and very useful feature especially now that 128GB thumb drives are now widely available.

What Asus booth would be complete without a Republic of Gamers edition motherboard on display? Not CES. On display was Asus’ new Rampage III Extreme P55 motherboard. Besides the amazing look of the board, which decidedly gets its theme from the BloodRage, it is apparent that Asus did their homework with regards to the layout. Take note, you can use four dual slot GPUs. It is rumored to retail for $389 when released in the not too distant future. It appears to have the potential to be a great overclocking board given the success of the P6T series. Given the price it has a high bar to reach since it is very near to the eVGA Classified. Stay tuned for a review.

Where things get interesting is gaming laptops. With the release of Clarksfield (Mobile i7 derivative) Asus went full bore with the G73JH. Admittedly Asus’ naming convention is quite, how shall I say it, annoying but the specs manage to make up for it. The laptop is a matte black finished rubberized exterior that manages to stuff a full desktop inside it. Full specs: 17.3” 1920x1080 Full HD display, Intel i7 Clarksfield processor, up to 2TB (dual HDD) storage, BluRay drive, ATI Mobile Radeon 5870 w/ 800 unified shaders and a price point of $1699. Check out the pictures. You might need a tissue to clean up afterwards though.

After picking myself up off the floor at the Asus booth we turboed over to MSI’s neck of the woods. MSI had an entire wall of motherboards outlined with a sea of GPUs. The interesting thing about the GPUs on the wall was the coolers.MSI has created custom heat pipe based coolers to improve the efficiency of the cooler dramatically. The results are lower noise and lower temperatures at the same load level. Not surprisingly the coolers are showing up primarily on nVidia’s GPUs.

Then there was MSi’s gaming laptop, the GT640/740. It is competing directly with Asus’ previously mentioned G73JH all be it at a slightly lower price point of $1599. The specs are largely the exact same as Asus’ laptop with one very key difference: the GPU. The previously mentioned Asus laptop rolls a newly released ATI Mobility 5870 where as the MSI GT640/740 rolls a nVidia GTS 250M. The Mobility 5870 rolls 800 unified shaders (akin to the 4870) where as the GTS 250M has 96 pipes (akin to the 9600GSO). Now, don’t immediately assume the Asus laptop will be faster. These are mobile variants running at very different clock speeds than their similar desktop cards as well as manufactured on different process nodes so it will come down to a review. Currently we are working trying to obtain review samples of both notebooks due to their similar target market and price point. The GT640/740 also has a sturdier magnesium case relative to the Asus’ high quality plastic exterior.

Stay tuned for further coverage.

Full Picture Listing Here:

http://s62.photobucket.com/albums/h8...010/?start=all

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