Here are the first pictures of ASUS' latest gaming desktop under its premium Republic of Gamers banner, the ROG CG8565. This black beauty is sculpted with the typical "edgy" design that has been found on recent ROG products. The case has no windows, but its design is enough to be an eyeball-magnet at LAN parties. The case looks well-ventilated with its intricately-designed vents on its top and sides. The front door slides down revealing the front panel, with two USB 3.0 ports, two USB 2.0 ports, audio, multi-format card reader, a Blu-ray ROM + DVD-RW combo drive, and a 3.5-inch SATA hard drive hot-swap bay. The ROG logo glows red when the system is powered on.

Under the hood, the ROG CG8565 is a Sandy Bridge-powered system. It is driven by an Intel Core i7-2600K quad-core processor, that's overclocked out of the box at 4.20 GHz. There are two higher OC presets that's selectable using the ROG panel, OC1 runs the CPU at 4.40 GHz, and OC2 runs it at 4.60 GHz. The CPU makes use of liquid cooling. In all likelihood, the motherboard is an ROG Maximus IV-class. There's 16 GB of dual-channel DDR3-1600 MHz memory.

In order to provide an alternative to flat and murky sounding onboard audio, ASUS has today released the new ASUS Xonar DX audio card. Impeccably designed for fine-tuned audio quality with 116dB SNR (Signal-to-Noise Ratio), it is equipped with innovative technologies like Dolby Home Theater Technologies and DS3D GX to provide crisp and clear audio quality and rich gaming sound effects.