WE DIDN‘T QUITE get Asus’ Immensity R.O.G. board that we spotted on Tuesday at Computex, but Asus held a special event earlier today talking more about its new motherboards and the Immensity was one of the products that it covered. We had a chance to speak with the product manager and he told us that the board might not actually make it into a final retail product in its current form.
The GPU on the board turned out to be a Radeon HD 5700-series, most likely a 5750 and the product manager mentioned that it’s extremely difficult to cool the GPU on the motherboard. The whole idea behind having a GPU on the motherboard is that the Lucid Hydra chip will automagically boost the performance of whatever graphics card you chose to add to your system. This sort of makes sense, but not for the additional cost of having a GPU on the motherboard.
We were also told that Asus could add any GPU to the board, be it ATI or Nvidia, as long as it’s possible to create a cooling solution for the GPU in question. The board works with a pair of graphics cards in conjunction with the onboard GPU. Asus never intended for the onboard GPU to be used on its own, despite the HDMI port on the rear of the motherboard.
We can’t say that we’re sold on this concept, although most of it would of course come down to cost. Lucid still needs to tweak its drivers for the Hydra chips as the performance is far from optimal when you’re mixing and matching certain GPUs. Either which way you look at it, Asus did at least come up with something unique and you can’t knock ‘em for that.S|A
Lars-Göran Nilsson
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