Asus and Smooth Creations

Asus

Asus made a very strong showing at Blizzcon this year.

They had a couple of their upcoming Core i5 motherboards on display. This is their Maximus III Formula motherboard, based on the P55 chipset obviously. Note the lack of any IDE. This board uses a 16+3 phase VRM (16 for the CPU and 3 for the memory). Expect it to make it to retail in the next few weeks.

What is mostly obscured by the GeForce cards in SLI is this motherboard is the upcoming Asus Rampage Gene III in the microATX form factor, so all you small form factor fans won't have long to wait for a Socket 1156 system.

Asus was also showing off their line of gaming laptops, here you can see the nicely backlit keys of the Asus G51Vx 15.6" laptop. Intel Core 2 Quad 9000 CPU, 15.6" LED backlit 1920x1080 widescreen, 4 GB RAM, GeForce GTX260M graphics, 640 GB 7200 RPM hard drive, 802.11n. Those of you in the market for a gaming laptop should keep this on your list.

Asus was showing off a lot of systems so here's a shot of another of their water-cooled rigs.

Smooth Creations

Asus teamed up with Smooth Creations for some custom paint jobs, here's a few samples of their work found around Blizzcon.