This is a tough call to make. We have seen strong continued support of our AM3+ boards especially the R2.0 series which was refreshed not that long ago. Overall the expectation of having AM3+ high performance ATX is a difficult one due to the high thermals and high power consumption. That being said we have seen continued interest in this type of solution and users looking for a better class of board in regards to OC, features and overall functionality. Currently it is something I am collecting more feedback from the community on but I do plan to discuss it with my product management team. Overall though there is no current project so this would at earliest be 4 to 6 months away. With that in mind we of course offer a wide range of great mATX Intel based solutions.
I cannot comment on products that may or may not be under design and development .... sorry.
As for other components we have no plans of entering into other component categories but will continuing working close with our valued partners to offer products that offer high compatibility and interoprability along with aesthetic consideration.
We have look at a number of possibilities and they border on extremely complex to almost impossible. The bigger question is whether you there are users in the community that would want the board enough to pay for the complex and specialized design required. Imagine a mini ITX board in the price range possibly exceeding 400 dollars.
With that noted as you have seen we have a track record of innovative design in pushing form factor performance forward. We are continuing to look at options to progress in this respect. While there are no guarantees you will see anything like this we are working to see what is at least possible.
NOW! We have released the Z97-I PLUS an awesome high performance and feature rich mini ITX motherboard.
http://www.asus.com/Motherboards/Z97IPLUS/
Nothing outside of what has already been communicated at PCDIY. Looking at mid to late Q2 as soon as more information is available it will be posted at PCDIY.
1. Cannot comment on an giveaway but I am sure Logan and Wendell will be following up with our technical marketing team on the possibility of giveaways.
2. This is surprising the CROSSHAIR series are pretty much the absolute best platform for AM3+ based CPUs? Have you updated the UEFI?
Overall I have had great experience in regards to usability, stability and overall reliability whether it be with the CROSSHAIR, SABERTOOTH or M5A series. You may want to consider doing an advanced RMA if you are really experiencing consistent issues. Of course if you have not I would first recommend updating the UEFI and loading full UEFI defaults with a clean OS to see how the system responds to ensure it is not an OS related issue.
You can save profiles and selection of that profile will allow you to auto load it at boot. We are looking into making it a more straightforward function along with numerious additions to features and functionality for our next large GPU TWEAK update. This will be sometime in Q3 to Q4.
We have some awesome functionality planned that I think will allow users new and old to really enjoy the experience of utitilzing GPU TWEAK.
As for motherboard with extra dimms it is not technically possible due to restrictions of memory controller, topology. The only other possibility would be a switch over to fail over on board memory which is something we have evaluated.
I would comment on but competitors have the tendency of copy our designs and we are working on exciting ones that I am hoping to have. As such stay tuned you will see a number of features I have wanted on boards included in this generation of motherboards ( Z97 ). As always though stay tuned we have exciting features and functionality planned.
As for the optical drives I am with you. This is something I have already discussed with our optical division and we evaluating options. Stay tuned.
After the limited response to the production of the M4A88T-I DELUXE when it was produced we have decided there are no plans for mini ITX AM3+ based solutions. We are evaluating whether we may developed APU based mini ITX solutions. Stay tuned as always as nothing is out of the realm of possibility should we have enough feedback from the community that they want to see some additional AM3+ solutions.
This is a tough call to make. We have seen strong continued support of our AM3+ boards especially the R2.0 series which was refreshed not that long ago. Overall the expectation of having AM3+ high performance ATX is a difficult one due to the high thermals and high power consumption. That being said we have seen continued interest in this type of solution and users looking for a better class of board in regards to OC, features and overall functionality. Currently it is something I am collecting more feedback from the community on but I do plan to discuss it with my product management team. Overall though there is no current project so this would at earliest be 4 to 6 months away. With that in mind we of course offer a wide range of great mATX Intel based solutions.
To follow up on your specific question though of just a single x16 slot if we did product a mATX solution it would not be limited to a single slot. We would focus on maintaining the expansion offered on mATX solutions including multi GPU capability. As for onboard audio as probably we have a track record of integrating high quality audio onboard and this would most likely be a focus if we were to develop this type of board.
Make sure to check out the videos that will be posted soon covering all the new features and functions.
Just some of the new features
5 Way Optimization featuring New Improved Auto Tuning and Fan Xpert III as well as App Tuning and much more ( the new options that are part of Auto Tuning and Fan Xpert III are seriously awesome )
Improved audio design
along with a lot more! As you know features and functions will vary to a degree from segmentation to segmentation ( Mainstream,TUF and ROG as well as WS )
Some of the consistent items are
Fan Xpert III
Improved Audio
New UEFI options
Updated network controller and new packet priority applications.
while I agree with all of that, its not your run of the mill mini-ITX motherboard its socket 2011, all of these motherboards run $400+ because they are 2011 with features such as overclockability, stability, or workstation grade, features you pay for, mini-ITX would be no different, so the real obstacle would be the market for it and that's something marketing will have to find out
- http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813132053
- http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813131802
- http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813131971
I believe asus was the first to make the Mini-itx form factor and I think they can be the first to make an enthusist mini-ITX as well, we as the consumer just need to make voice of it
mSATA has been replaced by M.2 ( NGFF ) Almost all of our boards will be supporting M.2 as well as SATA EXPRESS.
We will be showing off the HyperExpress module ( which will allow you hardware raid two M.2 or two mSATA SSDs ) and then connect to SATA EXPRESS.
Stay tuned.
We are looking at different options and currently it is a question of market place demand along with ensuring the functionality and features along with WS usage models. We are working on some really interesting design options. Stay tuned.
We are definitely aware of the benefit and want of the content creation and especially the videography community to have mobility in their systems while maintaining a focus on performance and connectivity as well as robust storage.
We do not officially support Linux on our motherboards outside of some WS models. With that noted I will forward this to my RD team to evaluate and see if the specification implementation is correctly enabled. IOMMU is a feature not heavily utilize by the majority of AMD chipset / AMD cpu users. With that noted if CPU/Chipset support the specification we strive to ensure its functionality.
Different functions have been revised as a whole in AiSuite III including UI layout as well as revised functionality ( considerably improved ) Auto Tuning as well as Fan Xpert. Make sure to check out the the videos covering these new updates.
Thanks for the kudos. As of right now we are not looking to expand in other products. We will continue to work with partners on interoprability and compatibility as well as color matching for aesthetics.
What's up!
If you are focusing on any type of content creation the CPU is overall the most important part of your build as most applications will be CPU limited. Storage array is important as well as the GPU depending on whether your application supports acceleration or assist processing from the GPU.
Overall though you will still want a high performance CPU for the workloads you have communicated the only area where this would differ is specific to transcoding ( which generally would be higher quality on CPU along with more adjustment options ) with that noted GPUs offer similar or potentially faster performance for transcoding compared to CPUs in this situation you could drop down to a slower CPU if you were only focusing on transcoding.
since asus is supporting M.2, will the M.2 slots have Msata/M-Pci-E backward compatibility, or at least a in the future?
Could we see a 4 or 5 way optimization on an amd board?