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A Look Inside the Labs of Asus
Kez writes "While in Taiwan, we had the rare opportunity to take a look around the Research and Development labs of ASUSTeK, well known motherboard and graphics card manufacturer. They had their latest dual chip 6800GT and 6800Ultra cards on the test beds (only two boxes full of which had passed quality control at that point,) and so grabbed some benchmarks while we were there."
Then get off your high horse and buy a normal, inexpensive graphics card like the rest of us you fool. Oh wait, if I wait 6 months this very same card will cost half of that?? WHAT? Are you serious, the cards go down in price when the next model comes out?
What happened to the day when a graphics card didn't take up my whole machine, and it didn't needs fans to cool itself down? Then there was no question if the 50c fan was going to kill my card.
I honstely doubt that ASUS does anything that could be dubbed as "research", especially not in the graphics card section. Testing different variations of the reference design and altering fans is hardly even development.
This is not news in the slightest. Regardless of the details or lack thereof, this architecture nears the end of its life. While extremely powerful, the power draw and heat generation is positively killer for the average system, and an annoying hurdle to jump for the serious custom PC builder. I had to fully watercool every 6800 I have owned just to keep the operating temperature at something that wouldn't be worrisome.
Let's be fair, the X800 is no slouch on power draw either. I am not trolling in the slightest.
What I am saying is that the future architectures that are down the pike, while designed for greater performance, also give much consideration to power draw and heat generation. The X850 series with its liquid metal cooling stock is a step in considerations of heat generation and power consumption. Nvidia's new core uses significantly less power if I read the latest buzz correctly.
This is the next great fight in the graphics card market: power and heat vs performace. Round 1, fight.
The Crimson Dragon
Are you serious? Just about every office/computer/electrical store here sells boards like that. I picked one up the other day with 8 individually switched sockets + surge protection for AU$29...
Same with any cooling system. If it fails, the thing it cools is fucked. Unless you have redundant fans, in which case you'll get a load of people complaining that it's too noisy.
However, if you RTFA, you would have seen that they have gone to the trouble of getting the fan from CoolerMaster, so it's probably quite high quality.
> Isn't ASUS the company that does not play well with Linux? I am
> not very interested, sorry.
Isn't Linux the operating system that doesn't play well with games that use graphics cards like this?
I am not very interested, sorry.
Can you be more specific? I run linux and use mostly Asus hardware and I can't say any of it has cause any trouble.
This is not a turnip.
The Hexus.net article is just an advertisement, with links to places to buy the cards that were reviewed. The writer didn't have any technical insights because he apparently has no technical knowledge. For example, read this sentence, "35A from the two 12V rails on the ASUS PSU keep things ticking over." First, it says on the label, which is clearly visible, that the maximum is not 35A times 12V = 420 Watts, but 324 Watts. Second, neither the graphic card nor the motherboard nor the hard drives require that much 12V power.
Manufacturers make so much money from taking advantage of the technical ignorance of customers that it has in some cases corrupted an area of the industry.
These are very special tools only supplied to special electrical appliances shops, and usually not available within handreach from your chair unless you actually have raised your lower part to get out and buy one (watch out for cars - they are dangerous and you have only one life).
No , Linux plays fine . Just the games makers (who often insist on using Direct-x as opposed to the more open and more widely supported OpenGL)and Graphics card manufacturers (specifically the chip makers) do not always produce reasonable drivers for the OS
The only things certain in war are Propaganda and Death. You can never be sure which is which though
I hadn't heard that. I did a little research and found that ASUS has an anti-Linux attitude, which is unfortunate considering the motherboard for my first Linux box was from ASUS.
I will say that an anti-Linux or at least Linux-ignorant attitude is hardly unique to ASUS to though.
I had two servers from HP that shipped with Linux when I worked as a sysadmin for one shop. Even though HP shipped these boxes with Linux installed on them, calling HP and getting technical support for the Adaptec-based HP-branded SCSI card was nearly impossible.
Turns out no one there knew anything about Linux. They said they'd call me back when they found someone who knew something about my problem. I didn't get a callback until 3 days later and it turns out there was 1 guy at that HP helpdesk facility that knew anything about Linux and he just got back from vacation.
It turns out by then I'd already figured out that the card was defective and simply ordered another one and let purchasing sort out the refund for the other card.
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Its always someone elses fault with Linux isnt it.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
Ironically, if you read the Display Manager box they show, the computer name is called 'LINUX-10N56ZQMA'. Future Linux support, anyone?
Second, neither the graphic card nor the motherboard nor the hard drives require that much 12V power.
No, they don't require that much power. But what particularly a video card does require is CLEAN power. HDs spin up and down, so their power usage varies... and since there's no such thing as a 'real' voltage source, the voltage supplied by the PSU does vary (however slightly) with amps drawn.
Putting your HD+Mobo and Videocard on a seperate rail prevents these fluctuations from affecting the stability of your (overclocked!) video card.
Get it now?
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And you where thinking that they would have Taiwanese power sockets? Last time I was there, the hotel I stayed in had UK socket, but that's all I know, could have been a mutant hotel... Who knows, the Brits where pretty active in that part of the world a few years back.
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
When it comes to hardware, that depends on a couple of things.
If it was a case where the drivers were supplied by the manufacturer of the hardware in an easily adaptable form, or the specs were practically shouted from the rooftops, then you could say it's Linux's fault - or more accurately, it's a flaw in the F/OS Software.
But considering how manufacturers - as well as you, me, and Joe Sixpack if he so felt inclined - can quite easily download the source to Linux, the GNU software, X11, CUPS, and numerous other bits of F/OS Software, making it so damn easy to know how to program the drivers correctly, I would say that the manufacturers are more at fault than the F/OSS programmers.
His name is Robert Paulsen...
The problem with ASUS boards is actually the bios. Their ACPI implementation is not complete. I've had a lot of problems with FreeBSD 5.x on ASUS boards, especially the nforce2 chipset models. I think GNU/Linux handles ACPI bugs better or at least in a similar way to windows.
Aside from the stuff above, I used to love asus. They sold certified Solaris x86 compatible motherboards in the late 90s. I had a nice solaris box running on a SiS chipset of all things. It worked for years. Anything before the softbios era was great. After that, they've never had a stable bios implemenatation and the ACPI bugs in more recent boards limit my use oF BSD. My last home built was a MSI board with an nforce2 chipset.. works great on FreeBSD 5.x (well the sata controller wasn't supported till i hacked it!)
MidnightBSD: The BSD for Everyone
They're not UK sockets. Refer to this handy socket identification page.
http://users.pandora.be/worldstandards/electricit
I noticed that powerstrip too. Some time ago I made something like this primarily because my soldering iron doesn't have an on/off switch. I got a few parts from Lowe's and made this: http://www.ikeweb.net/switch.jpg
The night lights serve as visual indication of whether that section is on or off, or they can be unplugged to give extra ports.
It actually has been very useful in testing things but something like what is in that picture would clearly be better...
I'm pretty sure he explicitly stated he wasn't looking for the under-monitor variety. The photo in the article clearly shows a power strip with switches next to each socket. As not-very-useful as I might find it, the OP does have a point; I've never seen one like that before.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere