Comments Locked

11 Comments

Back to Article

  • Umer - Thursday, June 6, 2019 - link

    I have long loved ASUS mobos and they've been my go-to choice, ROG line-up more so than Prime but I finally gave in few years ago in favor of all-white theme and my journey by dealing with the BIOS was so horrendous that ASUS themselves gave me an option to upgrade to another mobo by only paying a difference.

    I generally always check for forums to see if there's many issues with the product, to see and hear from other real-world users but for some reason I didn't on this one and regretted it a lot.

    With that said, this is very neat and I am in agreement with the author that companies willing to think outside of the box should be commended. Putting all my Prime issues aside, with that one particular mobo that left a very bad taste in my mouth, I would be the first one to jump to snag one of these bad boys if they were to be ever sold.
  • PeachNCream - Thursday, June 6, 2019 - link

    Would be interesting if you could route your GPU's output to the screen and either use it as a second monitor or as a primary one if you're one of those extremely rare unicorn types that drags a desktop to a LAN party. Though it's as unlikely to make it to market as most automotive concepts.
  • nathanddrews - Thursday, June 6, 2019 - link

    Could be done easily as a USB-connected display.
  • PeachNCream - Thursday, June 6, 2019 - link

    I've only had experience with USB-attached screens in the more distant past. USB 2.0 was too laggy even at low resolutions to support the usual FPS/RTS type LAN games I envision people may still play these days. Has modern USB 3.0+ improved on the latency or was that even a problem with 2.0 broadly (I won't rule out the possibility of crappy hardware my corporation fielded for our on-the-road claims teams being the source of a lot of lag issues).
  • Threska - Thursday, June 6, 2019 - link

    "For the regular PCIe slots, ASUS has put these on the rear of the motherboard. Obviously there’s a small amount of lane re-organization to make this happen, but the idea is that with the motherboard in this configuration, the CPU and SSDs can be on one side of the system, while the GPUs can be on the other. ASUS hasn’t yet said how this motherboard would be installed into a case, which might be interesting in its own right."

    I've been wondering why the backside in motherboards has gone unused for years? There are proprietary computers that have, but not ATX.
  • DanNeely - Thursday, June 6, 2019 - link

    Access is the main challenge. Outside of a possible hole around the CPU socket for an aftermarket mounting bracket the back is walled off behind a layer of sheet metal. Some mITX boards will stick an m.2 slot in the gap between the board and the part of the case it's mounted to; but the standoffs are too short to fit anything bigger.
  • Arsenica - Thursday, June 6, 2019 - link

    Modular I/O could be more useful if the modules could be placed somewhere else (like a case front panel) rather than where the I/O shield usually is, specially as there is no standard way of adding Thunderbolt 3 ports to a front panel.
  • Lord of the Bored - Thursday, June 6, 2019 - link

    The modular IO blocks could, honestly, be socketed anywhere you can route a PCIE lane.

    Incidentally, I had the idea for a customizable ATX port area a while back, with controllers in the port boxes. IO wound up being the issue. Faster PCIE makes it feasible, and I'm pleased to see it here.

    I'm interested in what these backside expansion cards look like. Are they retaining the same mounting bracket we've had since the 5150, or reworking this for something with a bit more convenience and stability? (Really, the rear panel modules are just very compact expansion "cards", so I would hope they applied similar ergonomic concerns to their backside.)

    In my imagination, they could be changed without even opening the system. Slide into rails, the connector is on the back end of the card, and the bracket screws into the back of the case from the outside, one screw on either side of the card. Like PCMCIA, only with screws to secure the card. It would move us back to having a standardized card length, but I'm not convinced that's a bad thing.

    And of course, I doubt any of this will ever see mass production, because launching a new form factor is REALLY HARD.
  • darkswordsman17 - Thursday, June 6, 2019 - link

    I like trying some new things, and I think the industry needs it as things like trace lengths become a prominent issue, necessitating new board layouts. I like the modular I/O although I'm not sure how robust their solution is and I'd prefer to move the I/O so that the area around the CPU socket can be focused on moving the heat out of there. The PCIe slots on the back would be interesting, but what case will this even fit if the PCIe slots are on the back?

    I think a GPU socket on the bottom lower half of a board, and then the back side would be for parallel placement of SSDs and I/O cards (that you could swap out, but could have ones for networking, audio, USB, etc). But the top part of the board would just have the the two hottest components (CPU and GPU) and be focused on maximizing the HSF and cooling options (so you could fit 3 120mm fans pushing heat from just those two right out of the case. Really, ideally the sockets would be fairly agnostic, and support say ~150-200W chips each, and you could slot in CPU, GPU, or APU, so you can have whatever setup suits your needs.
  • zodiacfml - Friday, June 7, 2019 - link

    Meh. A look into the future of motherboards in 2-4 years.
    Motherboard/system standards desperately needs an update. A GPU card should not be considered as an expansion card anymore but a system as important/potent as the CPU/mobo.
    I would like to screw in a GPU card into the case tray, install a CPU cooler to it.
    The system can be installed with two identical coolers. Or better, a huge air cooler or water cooler where the chips are attached and share the cooling capacity.
    Current stock GPU coolers are small and requires proprietary cooler design which adds cost.
  • usman1213 - Saturday, July 27, 2019 - link

    Hello, I think access is the main challenge. Outside of a possible hole around the CPU socket for an aftermarket mounting bracket, the back is walled off behind a layer of sheet metal. Some mITX boards will stick an m.2 slot in the gap between the board and the part of the case it's mounted to, but the standoffs are too short to fit anything bigger.<a href="https://www.techvinn.com/">Alan </a>

Log in

Don't have an account? Sign up now