Almost a day passed since the official launch of the new 600i series and feedback from the manufacturers came in an avalanche of press releases. This time it's about Asus and its motherboards. And that's pretty important, since it has had quite a success with p965/975x motherboard series. Asus rides the wave of glory and with the coming of 680i it can reach even higher; depending, of course, on the technology that will be introduced in this new motherboard.

Since you already know about the big launch that happened yesterday and probably still remember sufficient things about the new nForce chipset, I won't be bothering you with that, and I'll get straight to Asus and its shiny new knight.

Besides all the standard things that come with the new Striker series, Asus uses a LCD poster for the boot sequence. Nice feature for overclocking and debugging, but totally useless for the home user. An interesting thing is also the possibility to light the back IO plate that comes useful under poor light when you want to identify a port. Power, Reset and Clear CMOS switches are integrated directly into the motherboard. Quite cool and again useful for enthusiasts.

Last, we have an HD sound codec from the SoundMax series which can process Eax 2.0 and uses noise cancellation technology when connected to a microphone. Besides that, you get the usual plethora of connectors that come with a high end motherboard, including 3 1394a ports. Enjoy!