By Chris Scott Barr

When one sits down to look at motherboards for a new system, there are a lot of things to take into consideration. You have to make sure you’re getting the right socket for your processor, that it’ll accept the right type of RAM, and whether or not you want to mess with integrated graphics. The last one is generally a no-brainer. Unless you’re building a workstation that won’t be doing any gaming or video-intensive work, you’re going to want to slap in a dedicated video card.

Asus is wanting to change this idea, and are taking the first steps by integrating (comparatively) high-end graphics cards into one of their motherboards. This week at Computex they showed off such a board with an integrated 5770 GPU, which can keep pace with most of the latest PC titles. What’s more, is that the board is equipped with a HYDRA chip, which allows you to plug in another graphics card and run them both together, similar to SLI or Crossfire mode.

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By Chris Scott Barr

I’m sure that I’m not the only one that has more than one computer at his desk. However, I doubt very much that many people have multiple computers inside a single case (I know I don’t). Well the people at DFI have created a new motherboard which allows for two completely different systems to be ran off of it. The above video goes into greater detail, but essentially you have a P45 chipset running a socket 775 CPU, and an Atom-based configuration on the board. There are shared ports between the two, and you’ll be able to transfer files back-and-forth.

This new board is going to set you back around $399 when it hits the market in October or November of this year. The price really makes me wonder how many people are going to find many real applications for this. Personally, I’d rather have two different motherboards inside two different cases. It would be cheaper, you’d eliminate the single point of failure between two computers, and you could use both at the same time.

[ DFI ] VIA [ TweakTown ]