Published in Transportation

Asus adds Voltage tweaking by hand

by on13 June 2008

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Computex 08: To Rampage Extreme


Overclocking has
become one of the biggest and possibly most controversial things that people do with their computers, and the motherboard manufacturers have been fighting over who offers the best overclocking features for some years now. But never before have we seen anything like what Asus has added to its new Rampage Extreme X48 motherboard.

Asus has added two buttons and a small joystick, for lack of a better word, which allows you to manually tweak the Voltages of this motherboard, as in doing it by hand. We’re not sure what crazy engineer's wet dream this was at Asus, but we have a feeling that there will be a lot more dead Asus motherboards as people start playing around with this feature.

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Asus’s slogan for this feature which goes under the name of TweakIt, is “Hardcore OV with Finger Tweaking Fun.” OV stands for Over Voltage, if that wasn’t already clear. It also sounds like Asus borrowed heavily from KFC’s “Finger lickin' good” slogan here.

We’re not sure how it works, but the buttons are labeled Toggle and Confirm, with the joystick simply having the word Select underneath it, and having plus and minus markings on it. The board also has a reset and a large red power button labeled Start on it.

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There’s no display or any other kind of visual aid to know what you’re doing, and as we haven’t seen the manual for this motherboard yet we can’t tell you any details of how it wo,ks or how small increments you can increase the Voltage by, but we have a feeling this is one feature that won’t spread like wildfire to the other motherboard manufacturers.

The board also features an oddly located heatsink at the top right corner which appears to be cooling the memory power regulation circuitry, and this is the first time we’ve seen such an implementation on a motherboard.

Update: We've been informed by one of our readers that the LCD Poster which ships with the motherboard will be used for displaying the Voltage, although we're still not quite sure how useful this feature is, unless Asus will also include overclocking features. The same reader also told us that this board should be announced on Monday, so hopefully we'll find out more then.

Last modified on 13 June 2008
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