Hydra and onboard GPU get married by Asus
Paired up with X58 to create a unique R.O.G. board
Jun 1, 2010 in Desktop, Graphics
COMPUTEX IS ALWAYS full of surprises, but Asus’s new Immensity motherboard which is part of its R.O.G. series of boards is something that we didn’t expect to see. It’s based on Intel’s X58 chipset and has all the usual trimmings you’d expect on such a board, with two unusual additions – Lucid’s Hydra and an onboard ATI GPU with dedicated graphics memory.
Sadly Asus didn’t provide any details in terms of what the ATI GPU was, but hopefully one of our eagle eyed readers will be able to figure this one out. We wouldn’t expect it to be a very high-end GPU judging by the current chipset cooling design, despite the heatsink being quite large for a motherboard chipset heatsink.
Oddly enough the board only has a pair of x16 PCI Express slots which seems almost stingy on an X58 board, but this is likely a limitation of Lucid’s Hydra chipset. The board also has four x1 PCI Express slots, but unusually there isn’t a single PCI slot in sight. The rear I/O appears to have an HDMI port, but there are no other means to make use of the onboard GPU.
Other features of note includes two USB 3.0 ports, an eSATA connector, Asus’ R.O.G. Link, SATA 6Gbps and plenty of Fujitsu FPCAP capacitors. The board also appears to have a 16 phase power regulation, with an additional three phases for the chipset. There’s also an additional 8-pin power connector on the board for the PSU and a Molex connector that should deliver extra power for the graphics cards.
We’ll see if this board ever makes it to retail, but at least it’s an interesting concept and something out of the ordinary – just the kind of stuff that we’d expect to see at Computex. We have more motherboards from Asus coming that might not be quite as quirky, but still interesting.S|A
The Peanut Gallery