ASUS ZEUS: Concept Motherboard With Dual GPU Onboard

ASUS Zeus - Say that 3 times quickly.

Stepping away from the red and black world of ROG, but keeping one foot firmly in the land of "OMG" is the ASUS Zeus. The Zeus is part LGA 2011 motherboard and part dual-graphics behemoth, with a lashing of sexy heatsinks on the side. The board has the same tri-chip ASUS DIGI+ VRM Power hardware as the P9X79 Series, and it can handle up to 128GB of DDR3 over its 8 DIMM slots. The two 28nm PCIe Gen-3 GPUs (sorry for being unspecific) are actually soldered to the motherboard PCB itself, with their GDDR5 wrapped around them and the four PCIe power connectors (2x 8-pin, 2x 6-pin) laid along the bottom. Since they expand the whole width of the PCB, the X79 PCH has been moved above, just under the CPU socket. All this hardware is then put under silver and gold (color, not metal) anodized heatsinks. There's no PCI-Express expansion slots, but who cares when you could build the worlds only, low profile, high performance multi-GPU system! OK, so you do need some other peripherals after-all. What compensates the loss of expansion ports is the dual Thunderbolt connectors on the rear I/O. These two 10Gbps connections provide enough bandwidth for externalizing high-performance peripherals, while the rest of your case can be stuffed with hard drives and SSDs connected to the 10 SATA 6Gbps ports with hardware RAID at the opposite end of the PCB. Like all high-end ASUS motherboards today, it comes with the very latest 802.11ac Wi-Fi standard built in, plus Intel Gigabit Ethernet, 7.1 channel HD surround sound, two eSATA ports (in green at the top) and a total of 12 USB 3.0 ports spread across the rear I/O and front panel pin-outs. [gallery include="" size="large" link="file" template="file-gallery" columns="2"]