Hasta La Gadget!

As Bitcoins have become more valuable, they’ve also become much harder to accumulate using the mathematical process known as “mining.” This air of futility hasn’t fazed ASRock, however, as the company has revealed two new motherboards that promise to help DIY-ers to “join the gold rush now!” The H61 Pro BTC and H81 Pro BTC are both Intel socket boards, with the latter being Haswell compatible, and their main party trick is to carry extra PCIe slots and power connectors so you can exploit the compute power of up to six graphics cards simultaneously.

What ASRock doesn’t specify, however, is how much profit one of its fully-loaded mining motherboards might deliver. So, although we’re quite deliberately not experts at this stuff (aside from a bit of armchair interest), we plugged some numbers into the Bitcoin Profitability Calculator, based on six Radeon HD 7990 cards running in parallel, and discovered that this monster of a system might never actually break even, due to its ridiculously high energy costs. This could well explain why all the big boys use dedicated ASIC boards for mining these days, instead of consumer-grade hardware.

Filed under: Desktops

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Via: Bit-tech

Source: ASRock [1], [2]

Thunderbolt 2 is barely a real thing yet, but that hasn’t stopped ASUS rolling out the first product on the market to use the interface. Now, you can buy a motherboard that sports the super-fast data link.

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After winning yesterday’s Corsair Overclocking competition at Computex, the same folks were brought over to ASUS’ ROG event earlier today, where they overclocked an Intel Haswell Core i7-4770K from its typical 3.5GHz to a staggering 6.88GHz — just a tad less than yesterday’s 6.98GHz — on an ASUS Maximus VI Extreme motherboard. As a bonus, the DRAM frequency was also pushed to 4.1GHz, which is believed to be the fastest yet on Haswell. As usual, the overclockers poured liquid nitrogen onto the chip every now and then to keep it cool, thus giving us the above photo opportunity.

Filed under: Desktops, ASUS, Intel

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After the announcement that they’d created a set of motherboards based on the Intel Z87 chipset specifically for the next generation of Intel Core processors, today the team is aiming at making their offering unique with NFC, Thunderbolt, and 4-way optimization. With the ASUS Z87 motherboard lineup, the team at ASUS is pushing DELUXE/DUAL as the first Intel 8 series-based montherboard that’ll be certified for Intel Thunderbolt technology. This first board will ship with two Thunderbolt ports right out of the box.

The Z87-EXPERT was shown for the first time today, this joining the DELUXE/DUAL with Thunderbolt technology as well. Inside these bits of architecture, users will find Dual Intelligent Processors 4 with 4-Way Optimization, here detecting and adjusting configurations dynamically to bring on the best setup based on actual PC usage.

This range works with an updated UEFI BIOS bringing user-friendly functions aside Wi-Fi GO!, what ASUS describes as “new generation” 802.11ac wireless connectivity. NFC EXPRESS is added to the Z87 lineup with wire-free pairing of desktop PCs with a variety of smartphones – Android first, remote PC control and content sharing included.

The NFC EXPRESS accessory has added a sensor box to the mix, this being the spot where you’ll be tapping your smartphones to pair with your NFC EXPRESS-laden ASUS Z87 motherboard. This device connects to your PC with its two USB 3.0 ports and allows password-free Windows 8 login, automatic data syncing, and again, Remote Desktop connectivity – which we’re especially interested in seeing due to the relative lack of dedicated services as such in the Android world aside services like SplashTop.

The NFC EXPRESS accessory ships with the Z87-DELUXE/DUAL motherboard but can also be purchased separately. ASUS Z87 motherboards are shipping right this minute – availability and pricing varies by territory, but you can expect prices to appear anywhere between $180 and up above $450, with manufacturers on the open range.

SOURCE: ASUS

ASUS Intel Z87 motherboards gain “EXPERT” model, NFC, and Wi-fi for Haswell is written by Chris Burns & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

Not that we were necessarily asking for it, but we now have another spec to weigh up when choosing a new Haswell motherboard. ASRock’s A-Style Z87 mobos will come with a bunch of audio-related features collectively called “A-Style: Purity Sound”, which the company claims will result in a better signal-to-noise ratio (115dB) compared to regular onboard 7.1-channel circuitry. The boards will also come with a dedicated headphone amp that should be able to high-impedance drive cans up to 600 Ohms, plus DTS Connect for converting PC audio to the DTS codec for optical out. There’s some extra shielding around the components, which lends plausibility to the better SNR and the promise of better sound quality — so Purity Sound probably can’t be dismissed as Purity Marketing. In any case, just make sure you also pay this much attention to your next power supply.

Filed under: Desktops, Gaming, Home Entertainment

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Via: FarEastGizmos

Source: ASRock