ASUS ZEUS is a motherboard, and yes it comes with two powerful graphics circuits integrated onto the circuit board. ASUS follows up a swarm of unique mobile products with a highly unique motherboard where Intel’s most powerful CPU is accompanied by two graphics circuits from AMD.
ASUS has a habit of producing at least a few odd design concepts for various components and like last year it has presented a motherboard with integrated graphics at Computex. ASUS ZEUS builds on Intel’s X79 platform and supports the most powerful hexa-core Core i7 processors with Socket 2011. The motherboard that is shown at Computex 2012 is made with a black PCB with silver and gold details. Besides a cool design ASUS has gone all the way to arm the board with chips and features.
Except from a powerful 10 phase Digi+ power supply for the processor we find eight DDR3 slots with up to 128GB RAM capacity. It gets even more interesting when we travel south from the socket. Here we find two dedicated power supplies for not one but two dedicated graphics circuits integrated on to the motherboard. ASUS has not revealed exactly which graphics circuits are used, but VR-Zone believes we are dealing with Radeon HD 7970 (Tahiti XT) in a CrossFireX setup. It sounds a bit much, but when we find dual 8-pin and dual 6-pin power connectors below the graphics circuits there is no doubt in our mind we are dealing with some really powerful graphics circuits.
The graphics circuits have their own dedicated graphics memory and are connected to the mini-DisplayPort and Thunderbolt output, but there are also a regular DisplayPort and HDMI output.
ASUS ZEUS is no lightweight the graphics aside; eight SATA 6,0 Gbps ports, four SATA 3,0 Gpbs ports, twelve USB 3.0 connections and one Gigabit Ethernet port. The only thing missing is the traditional PCI Express slots for expansion cards. Instead we find the graphics circuits and their dedicated components.
While ZEUS is a cool concept chances are that we won’t see it in shops. First of all we don’t have a clue how ASUS intends to cool the two GPU circuits with simple passive cooling that is used on the concept board, while the price will also be very high. A cool concept is still a cool concept and ASUS continues to try new things, which we appreciate.
