ASUS Booth Tour at CES 2016: 10G Switches, External GPU Dock, USB-C Monitor and more
by Ian Cutress on January 19, 2016 9:00 AM ESTRepublic of Gamers
As mentioned on the first page of this piece, ASUS is celebrating their ‘10 Years of ROG’ during 2016, and while I imagine the big party will be at Computex later this year, there was still a few things to show off for CES. First up is this little number, made entirely of Lego.
If you can make it out, there is an ROG Maximus VIII Impact motherboard in the middle there (read our review at this link) but it still needed a power supply, CPU cooler and the rest to be an actual PC. Nonetheless, I’m all for interesting displays like this.
For actual products already in the channel or coming to market, here’s a 21:9 G-Sync enabled monitor, the ROG Swift PG348Q:
If 2015 did not have enough 21:9 panels, it would seem that 2016 is starting off on the right foot. This one will hit in at 100 Hz while still showing a 3440x1440 resolution and all the bells and whistles of a fully adjustable monitor. There’s an added extra, if you happen to be showing it off:
It’s a small touch, but interesting.
ASUS has been selling ROG systems for a while now, and while the US is technically not the strongest market for this, they do have some sales and the GT51 here is another product in that line.
The specifications are perhaps pretty obvious: Core i7 Skylake processors with up to GTX TITAN X graphics in SLI, lots of storage, fast memory and USB 3.1 in Type-C format. What got my interest here is the ROG Band also on show:
Excuse the low quality image (it turns out all of my images were bad for it), but the idea here is a simple device that will lock/unlock the machine similar to a keyless car system, but the wristband will also allow simple overclocks to be activated when requested. That perhaps sounds gimmicky at best, or perhaps the lock/unlock might not be for the security conscious, but anything that saves a few seconds here and there is going to be of interest somewhere down the line.
Last up is the ROG Claymore keyboard. It comes out as it looks – a full RGB enabled mechanical keyboard with Red, Brown, Blue or Black switches in that ROG/Mayan aesthetic. The keypad is able to switch sides when needed. The construction and feel during my few moments of use felt good, with special button allocations for overclocking when using the software, as shown in the video:
Unfortunately there are no media keys or macro keys, although given that there is a left-right modular system, I would suggest to ASUS that a media/macro panel should be made so it can be placed on either side similar to the keypad.
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randomhkkid - Tuesday, January 19, 2016 - link
The ROG GX700 dock only contains radiators and pumps, the 980 laptop gpu is housed in the laptop itself. http://core0.staticworld.net/images/article/2015/1...hechacker1 - Tuesday, January 19, 2016 - link
That's a good start for a 10G switch, but it really needs more 10G ports to be useful. I deploy 10G all the time for my job, and we use the Intel X520, which is a generation behind, but stable as a rock and supported everywhere. It also can be found for relatively cheap (sometimes $250). At those prices it almost makes sense to build your own "switch" by just using 10G cards and directly connecting where you need it. I know in my environment I really only need 10G to my NAS, and then 10G to the workstation for media / VMs.BrokenCrayons - Tuesday, January 19, 2016 - link
A Cherry Trail phone with 4GB of RAM and 256GB of storage for $350 sounds great. Now if only a certain software company that makes operating systems would be kind enough to stop it with the silly pricing that keeps budget laptops with Cherry Trail processors chained to half that much RAM and 1/8th of the storage. >.<Pissedoffyouth - Tuesday, January 19, 2016 - link
Why the hell do they have to make a retarded version of the zenphone with bigger battery. Give me the atom version with 5000mah battery and I'll pay good money for itcfineman - Tuesday, January 19, 2016 - link
So when is that gsync monitor coming out? Seems like's it's been vaporware for a while... are they trying to work out the of the QC issues Acer has been dealing with or...???CaedenV - Wednesday, January 20, 2016 - link
@Ian, I am also excited that 10/t is finally coming to the consumer market! I have a NAS, and constantly have to move around ISOs and uncompressed video files/projects between my main PC and my NAS. Thankfully I get a solid 98-102MB/s... but the idea of being able to get 980MB-1GB/s sounds too good to be true! I mean, a Windows ISO would take a mere 10 secconds to transfer... heck at those speeds just use the NAS like a local HDD and write straight to and from it without ever transferring to a local disc!Thankfully for me though, the rest of my family is quite alright with gigabit Ethernet and WiFi, so having only 2 10Gb/s connections is not a bad limitation for me. They need to bring the price down a bit more before I'll bite though. $200 for an unmanaged switch with 2 10Gb/s ports and 4 1Gb/s ports, and $75-100 for each card. Still, I could see it being something when I do my next big build in a few short years.
... now if only they can do something about my 25mbps internet conneciton and 5mbps uplink...
sor - Wednesday, January 20, 2016 - link
The switches are underwhelming. We've had affordable switches with a few 10g + a bunch of 1g for awhile.10g baseT has been a pretty epic failure so far. I managed to find a 48 port Dell 3 years ago, pretty much the only full 10G baseT available, and it was so power hungry that it couldn't keep more than 24 ports running at once. They took it back, then discontinued the line. SFP+ and twinax for cheap copper interconnects worked much better.
merikafyeah - Wednesday, January 20, 2016 - link
10GbaseT is actually a mandatory part of the Thunderbolt 3 spec, so a TB3 (USB Type-C) switch could finally bring affordable 1GB+/s transfers to consumers.noeldillabough - Wednesday, January 20, 2016 - link
Will 10G work reliably over Cat6/6a? Or do we need to use Cat7/8 etc?sor - Thursday, January 21, 2016 - link
6a is the standard for 10g baseT. There are other types floating around like 6e, 7, 7a, etc, but none are standards based, mostly marketing.