Foxconn lines up against Asus as high-end mainboard battle loomsAnalysis Who wins? This time, it's us "enthusiasts"By Nebojsa Novakovic: Tuesday, 19 February 2008, 12:32 PMTURN BACK time to three years ago, and try to put "Asus" and "overclocker" in a single sentence. No way, it would have been a truly nasty oxymoron. MSI, Gigabyte, were all ahead of Asus' mediocre mobo performance -enhancing capabilities. Then the Republic of Gamers (ROG) - not Republic of China (ROC) mind you - came along.Fast forward to today. Asus ROG boards lead the high-end enthusiast market. Who doesn't know of the Extreme board series with aggressive names like Striker, Blitz, Maximus, Rampage and so on. There is also a notch-below "Formula" series with the same names as above for those more cost-conscious.With quality components, highly optimised designs, high overclocking and fancy features like more than two PCIe x16 slots or LCD status displays, these mobos are the "cream of the crop", now ahead of the smaller players like MSI or Gigabyte.But is Asus going to occupy that comfy seat for the rest of the year? Foxconn thinks otherwise. This huge company is the only real competition to Asus in size and resources in Taiwan. Last year, its new "Quantum Force" outfit, a direct answer to ROG, had its staff strengthened, including bringing in " Shamino", the well-known Singaporean overclocking record-breaker.Quantum Force went on to create BlackOps X48, a truly nasty mainboard, the first to have a "Quantum Cooler", the first modular cooling approach directly supporting water, dry ice and LN2 for the chipset, with heat pipes handling the rest (see picture). The CPU area has sufficient space to mount pretty much any kind of cooling too.Another novelty from Quantum Force is the elongated 10-slot board and matching chasis. If you want four PCIe x16 slots and still plenty of PCI cards fitting in, even if the graphics cards are two-slot ones, this is the way to go. Don't forget, though, that only a few per cent of "enthusiasts" would really need this, as they are more likely to simply get thin waterblocks to fit their GPUs into one slot each.BlackOps and the 10-slot board are still not near volume shipping, and Asus should have time to upgrade its own top models accordingly. An X48-based Rampage Extreme ROG board could have nicely complemented the new Striker 2 Extreme, based on Nforce 790i. Will they do it?Come late this summer, expect the first "Tylersburg DT" mobo samples for high-end "Bloomfield" Nehalem desktops to trickle out. Three-channel DDR3, new socket, new thermals, and then the dual-socket "Gainestown Tylersburg DP" for uberenthusiasts in the same time frame. That would be the real battlefield for the two vendors to show their performance-enhancing prowess.In summary, it will be an interesting year at the "enthusiast" top end of the PC mainboard market. The biggie, Asus, for the first time has another giant, Foxconn, aiming for its high-end share. And, as you'll remember from our interview with Asus President Jerry Shen, Asus itself will this year focus on becoming a major global high-end vendor at the system level. Looks like a lot of benchmark comparison fun coming up.
