ASUS will be celebrating their 30th anniversary this year and they want to drastically rethink the design of motherboards. At Computex they were showing a concept called Prime Utopia which might show where motherboards are headed if we move away from the ATX standard that has been in place since 1995.
ASUS has rearranged the motherboard for better efficiency. With everything on a single side we really run out of room for things. So with the Prime Utopia CPU VRM and PCI-Express slots are actually on the back of the motherboard. This is to facilitate both the cooling of the system as a whole and the graphics card itself. The VRM is actually liquid-cooled.
With the PCI-Express slots moved to the back of the motherboard you have more room on the front of the board for other devices. There are four M.2 slots which will enable super-fast RAID setups. On the front of the motherboard above the M.2 slots will be a 7-inch OLED touchscreen that offers various readouts. This display is actually WiFi enabled, which means you would be able to set it on your desk to monitor your system and adjust settings.
ASUS also wants you to have a very flexible I/O. Instead of having a fixed layout of I/O ports, this design combines static ports with four modular blocks that let you define your own rear I/O. So if you need more USB install USB, need dual Ethernet install that! These blocks connect via Mini-PCIe and are completely self-contained so the silicon that drives the port or connection is all there.
One of the more interesting things about this motherboard is the new Hydra Cortex fan header that supports up to four fans from a single motherboard connection. This connection would allow independent control of both rotational speed and addressable RGB lighting for each fan. This would allow for a very clean setup, we are definitely fans of less cables!
ASUS had the Prime Utopia concept on display at Computex and it did look pretty awesome! What are your thoughts on the Prime Utopia?
Via The Verge
