ASUS Displays ROG Immensity Concept Motherboard

[btarunr]

ASUS showed off a unique motherboard concept part of its Republic of Gamers series, the ROG Immensity. This socket LGA-1366 motherboard comes with onboard graphics, using a discrete ATI Radeon HD 5000 series GPU with dedicated GDDR3 memory. While the Intel X58 Express + ICH10R chipset are very much there, the X58 is wired to a Lucid Hydra Engine chip, which drives both the PCI-Express 2.0 x16 slots. It is probably also connected to the ATI Radeon GPU, giving users the ability to stay connected to the on board GPU, while 3D graphics is accelerated from any graphics card plugged in to the PCI-E slots, of any make, and in any combination (including NVIDIA + ATI). The Hydra chip handles the load-balancing between the GPUs depending on their computation power and features available.

Apart from this unique feature, the ROG Immensity is designed for extreme overclocking, making use of an 8-phase PWM circuit with additional stabilizers and power conditioning using super-ML capacitors. Memory is powered by a 6-phase PWM circuit with its own power-conditioning super-ML capacitor. All ROG-exclusive features such as iROG and ROG-Connect are present. Connectivity features include SATA 3 Gb/s RAID, two SATA 6 Gb/s ports, USB 3.0, Bluetooth, gigabit Ethernet, and 8-channel audio. Four PCI-E x1 slots make for the rest of the expansion. For now ASUS chooses to call this a concept design, so it's uncertain whether it will release it to market any time soon.



View at TechPowerUp Main Site

 

[pentastar111]

Wow...very nice board.

 

[Frick]

Crazy stuff this. Another site mentioned a retail price at €300, if it ever comes to that.

 

[Haytch]

Very nice features, worthy of the ROG tag.
Love the Lucid Hydra. Wish they started adding this ability to more of their board range.

 

[WarEagleAU]

Wish they would make an AMD flavored one. Nice concept though, wonder if that is a 4290 IGP on that board with the Lucid.

 

[Frick]

Wish they would make an AMD flavored one. Nice concept though, wonder if that is a 4290 IGP on that board with the Lucid.

Some have been told it's a 5770 and others 5450. I sure hope it's the former.

 

[IceCreamBarr]

I like seeing the legacy connectors removed. There must be a significant percentage of people who never intend to use PCI or IDE on their new builds. Sure some need it but increasingly less... in fact, if I was designing a board I'd remove 3 of the 6 memory slots. Cheaper board to produce, cheaper board to buy and it has what most will use anyways.

Barr

 

[ebolamonkey3]

Agreed on the IDE, but removing the RAM slots would be too much.

 

[Jstn7477]

Looks like a Redwood (5570 or 5670) on that board.

 

[RejZoR]

This seems like a future of PC's. Wait for them to start integrating CPU's on them. When you'll buy a mobo, you'll get everything on it. The new age (console) PC's.

 

[btarunr]

Added picture of the board with its heatsinks on.

 

[Frick]

The heatsinks are rubber right? I read somewhere that they were rubber because nothing was exactly finished..

 

[Assimilator]

I doubt this will ever make it to market... in fact I can't see why ASUS would have allowed resources to be spent on constructing a prototype like this.

Lucid Logix Hydra: performance is only as good as the drivers, which are crap (to put it kindly) and will never be as good as the GPU vendors' drivers.
integrated ATI GPU: why? Last time I checked, people who spend a lot of money X58 boards don't want or need integrated graphics, since they also spend a lot of money on discrete graphics and don't really care about power/heat. If this was an nVidia GPU I could understand as it could be used for PhysX, but it's not.
2x full-length PCI-E slots: yay, you can 1 ATI and 1 nVidia card in tandem... so why not just go for SLI or Crossfire to get the best performance?

In short, I can't see any purpose for this board to exist except as a marketing gimmick. There are many other X58 boards out there that offer more useful features at a lower price point.

 

[naoan]

I doubt this will ever make it to market... in fact I can't see why ASUS would have allowed resources to be spent on constructing a prototype like this.

Lucid Logix Hydra: performance is only as good as the drivers, which are crap (to put it kindly) and will never be as good as the GPU vendors' drivers.
integrated ATI GPU: why? Last time I checked, people who spend a lot of money X58 boards don't want or need integrated graphics, since they also spend a lot of money on discrete graphics and don't really care about power/heat. If this was an nVidia GPU I could understand as it could be used for PhysX, but it's not.
2x full-length PCI-E slots: yay, you can 1 ATI and 1 nVidia card in tandem... so why not just go for SLI or Crossfire to get the best performance?

In short, I can't see any purpose for this board to exist except as a marketing gimmick. There are many other X58 boards out there that offer more useful features at a lower price point.

Looks pretty good to me
http://techreport.com/articles.x/17934/3

Though I wish they integrate nvidia gpu instead to handle the miscellaneous stuff like physx and cuda (the least important one) and let us use ATi as the main discreet card. :/

 

[hat]

Can you say "capicators"?

 

[dna1x]

I'd buy it.

 

[araditus]

Though I wish they integrate nvidia gpu instead

Can't, the heat would be unbearable for the board and probably melt...

 

[HillBeast]

While I'm all for the idea of integrating a GPU onto the motherboard, I still think putting a G92 or a GT240 or something like that on board would be a smarter choice because then it would be onboard PhysX. I know the Hydra will let you boost performance with the Radeon onboard, but I'd say it won't be the most powerful chip and it won't be that much of a boost from it. PhysX would've been better.

 

[wahdangun]

by the look of the heatsink th gpu must be HD 5550, its great idea asus launch this, i will buy it if they can come out in AMD falvor

 

[DaJMasta]

An integrated GPU is interesting, but it's true I don't see this product as making sense with it. Think about it:
This is clearly marketed towards the enthusiast
A mid to low end GPU, even with the hydra, can't add that much more performance to the equation when using high end parts
The presence of the discrete chip means more board complexity, more power requirements, and less space for other 'enthusiast' features (like another PCI-E x16 slot)
In the end, because of the additional stuff on the board, there's a chance that overclocking performance would actually be worse than without it


I'm just not sure why they'd introduce this on this high end board - even if it is only a concept. This kind of feature would be more useful on a slimline HTPC board, or if it had a nVidia GPU, at least it could be used to accelerate PhysX. Unless ASUS knows something we don't about ATi GPU computing acceleration, there just doesn't seem to be a good reason to have this combination of stuff.

 

[cdawall]

maybe this is just something to prove a concept and later on we will see different cards built in. also no NV because NV would shit a brick if they used their parts without writing NV everywere and using a NV chipset

 

[Jstn7477]

While this is an enthusiast-looking board, I don't think the discrete GPU onboard is such a bad thing. It would seemingly be useful if your graphics card died or for board troubleshooting.

Example: My friend's GTX 280 died about 4 days ago, and he doesn't have any money to get any graphics card at the moment. All he has right now is his netbook. If he had a board with a discrete GPU like this (since you can't get an IGP on high end boards or processors currently), he would still be able to play WoW, TF2, etc. at moderate settings.

Not everyone possesses extra parts or money all the time to keep their rigs going.

 

[pr0n Inspector]

While this is an enthusiast-looking board, I don't think the discrete GPU onboard is such a bad thing. It would seemingly be useful if your graphics card died or for board troubleshooting.

Example: My friend's GTX 280 died about 4 days ago, and he doesn't have any money to get any graphics card at the moment. All he has right now is his netbook. If he had a board with a discrete GPU like this (since you can't get an IGP on high end boards or processors currently), he would still be able to play WoW, TF2, etc. at moderate settings.

Not everyone possesses extra parts or money all the time to keep their rigs going.

Obvious flaw: you paid for the GPU in the first place. it just came soldered on the mainboard.

 

[Wile E]

This board is just meh to me. This concept would have been better put to use on P55.