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 ESTASUS Motherboards
No discussion about ASUS would be complete without talking about motherboards. We had already reported the announcement of the ASUS Maximus VIII Formula launch just before CES, featuring a pre-installed EKWB water block on the power delivery, but there were still a trio of surprises for us at the booth.
First up is the B150 Pro Gaming/Aura. As like other manufacturers, one of the things with this generation of Intel processors is moving some of the ‘gaming’ features on the high end Z series motherboards down to lower cost chipsets in order to add value. This includes styled heatsinks, a color scheme, upgraded audio in some cases, and a drive to enhanced storage or networking functionality (this board has 2x2 802.11ac with MU-MIMO for example, most likely the Qualcomm Atheros chipset). So here enters this mini-ITX motherboard, which for all intents and purposes fits the standard for a gaming motherboard.
It also comes with RGB LEDs at the bottom, hence the AURA part of the name.
Elsewhere in the booth were a couple of new motherboards not aimed specifically at the gaming crowd.
The ASUS TUF Sabertooth Z170 S (or Mark S) is the Skylake white camouflage version of the limited edition Z97 Sabertooth Mark S (read our review of unit #0001 here), except this time the Z170 version will not be limited edition. As with other motherboards in the Z170 range, this gets the upgrades for Skylake chipsets – USB 3.1 in Type A/C formats, PCIe M.2 based storage and more PCIe lanes to do things with. The Mark S is part of the TUF line, which is ASUS’ 5-year warranty line (5-years in NA, other regions may differ) and the line is usually that these boards offer components with higher durability and/or more protection as a result. The color scheme is one that ASUS feels works will with the branding, and we have seen the Mark S boards used in a number of white system builds throughout the show.
Next to the Mark S was the Z170-PREMIUM, marking a return to the high end with the Premium name for ASUS. This sits above the Deluxe, peeling bits and pieces from the Formula and Extreme. This means four USB 3.1 ports on the rear, two of which I imagine are powered by Intel’s Alpine Ridge and should support Thunderbolt 3 when validated. There is also 3x3 802.11ac dual-band WiFi, dual Intel networking, onboard U.2, support for M.2, and an extended power delivery heatsink.
Typically the Premium line also comes with a box stuffed full of extras. Back with the Z77-Premium we saw a 32GB mSATA drive as part of that bundle, though we might instead see here either a U.2 cable or a pair of front panel USB 3.1 boxes to use up all the SATA Express connectors. It will be interesting to watch, and it certainly won’t come cheap.
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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.