Asus Offers Premium Service For ‘Enthusiast’ Motherboards

Taipei, Taiwan-headquartered ASUSTeK Computer Inc has announced a new service for owners of certain classes of motherboards. Christened “Asus Premium Service” (APS), the program offers a limited warranty service allowing cross-shipment on its top-shelf motherboards: the Republic of Gamers (ROG) series such as Crosshair II Formula, Maximus II Formula, Rampage /Extreme /II Extreme and the Striker II NSE / II Extreme / II Formula, and the P6T series such as P6T Deluxe and /OC Palm.

Of these, P6T Deluxe and Rampage II Extreme are X58 iCore7 motherboards that house Intel’s latest iCore7 series CPUs.

The offer stands for a period of one year after purchase. Customers wanting to avail of this service are required to return the defective / non-functional parts within 14 days of submitting the warranty replacement request.

Founded in 1989, the company is a leading manufacturer of PC motherboards, and has a preferred business relationship with Intel for all its CPUs. Asus has manufacturing facilities in Taiwan, mainland China, Mexico and the Czech Republic with a total monthly production capacity of 2 million motherboards and 150,000 notebook computers.

Read  more about the new service from Asus here.

Nvidia Launches Entry-Level Graphics Boards For Small Form Factor Systems

Santa Clara, California-based Nvidia Corporation today (November 7) announced the launch of entry-level graphics boards for small form-factor computer systems.

The new NVIDIA Quadro FX 370 Low Profile (LP) is an entry-level motherboard with a price tag of USD 149, and is targeted for professionals looking for economical configurations for CAD and Digital Content Creation (DCC) applications. The motherboard does not require cooling fans, making for a quieter working environment. Some of its worth-noting features include a unified GPU architecture that dynamically allocates processing power for geometry, shading and pixel-processing, a proprietary “CUDA” technology that provides for parallel computing through 8 cores, 128-bit precision graphics pipeline which generates very high accuracy which in turn impacts visual quality, 32-bit floating point precision, filtering and blending, advanced color compression and early z-culling for improved bandwidth and rendering efficiency, besides full-scene anti-aliasing. The motherboard also has extensive I/O slots to connect peripherals such as SAS and dual GbE.

Additionally, a single / dual display architecture enables users to spread their work across multiple displays. When coupled with appropriate applications, this feature can give a tremendous boost in productivity.

Read more about the launch here.