Not content with just showing up at Computex 2012, ASUS decided to try to steal the show and it seems to be succeeding, if only by virtue of how absurd some of its products are.
Sure, there is the regular supply of
tablets and “regular”
motherboards, but they haven't been getting much attention because of things like 5G WiFi laptops, the 8 GB Dual GTX 680 Mars III graphics card and a dual-GPU motherboard of all things (that's right, motherboard not video board).
Now, we are seeing
reports of another absurdity: the un-dated and un-priced Z77 Wolverine motherboard prototype, which features a 40-phase VRM (ASUS supposedly promises it has a Digi+).
And we thought, Gigabyte's
Z77X-UP7 was beyond overkill, at 32 phases. It shows what we know.
The 40 phases are divided into sets of 20, placed on each side of the PCB. There is a catch though: ASUS probably thought more about lowering load per “phase” and reducing driver-MOSFET temperature, rather than pure overclocking potential. We say this because there is a single 8-pin EPS connector.
The rest of the specs aren't too shocking: three PCI Express 3.0 x16 slots, four SATA III ports, four SATA II, three PCI Express 2.0 x16, 802.11 b/g/n Wi-Fi + Bluetooth, dual Gigabit Ethernet and six USB 3.0 ports (plus two via headers).
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