Gadgetory

welcome to Jays two cents exclusive insider coverage of CES 2014 our trip this year is brought to you by aqua tuning your global source for PC modding and cooling components and by Sennheiser the pursuit of perfect sound and of course by generous viewers like you so strap in with Jays two cents as he takes you on a wild ride through CES 2014 hey guys you're watching Jays two cents and we're continuing our exclusive insider coverage of CES 2014 and I'm still in the ROG booth here for the Asus suite and we're going to take a look at something that I think you guys might find really interesting you guys are always asking me about different types of controls for your fans and other aspects of your system so JJ is going to show us something here that I think is really unique I really don't know much about it I mean we talked about a little bit right now but I'm going to turn it over to JJ and let him tell you why what we're looking at here is considered really awesome so JJ take it away yeah so what we have right here is actually the ROG front base so something that we've been working on for a while if you've kind of been following ASUS motherboards for a couple of years one of the big focal points on the design front has been our evolution of fan controls we're really the first vendor that committed to saying hey if you're going to have fan headers on a board we want extensive functionality it's not just about being able to plug it in and have power we want to be able to go in customize fan profile curves want to be able to set you know and three pin fan on PWM friendly yeah we want to be able to have that flexibility and support and so that's become now standard right whether you're looking at our x79 or z87 even our AMD motherboards we're giving you the BAPS of the best class of fan controls but for some users they want even more flexibility as well as they might want something that aesthetically looks cool so we started off on z87 with this little guy right here which was the OC panel and this guy's actually just started to hit the market and this was originally only provided with our maximum six extreme and it gave a lot of specialized functionality such as being able to dynamically adjust the voltage or the B CLK or the multiplier you could see your post code display information when your system was starting up I really like the adjustable display on here so you could lay it flat on your desk you could set it in the stand and you had you know even more esoteric levels of controls for users that wanted to you know do bench top testing they could plug in fans directly into there they could go ahead and do some soldering so that they can have advanced voltage control so they could overclock it their GPUs even more effectively you know and a lot of other specialized controls now the cool part was we've made this a dual type setup so that you go ahead and take this guy dock it into this right here and then put that in a five and a quarter bay and then you could have you know one touch adjustment for your CPU fan one touch overclocking you could see your CPU temperatures and voltages and whatnot but what we wanted to do was even evolve this further and so that's what we've actually done here with the front base so if we take a look at the front base we've moved over from a basic display to an extra full four inch LCD which you can see is carrying a lot of information that we have on there so we're getting everything from our CPU frequency to the RPM data to the CPU temperatures we can make adjustments to our volume so you know if you've got your system maybe positioned down on the floor I've got a big t jo7 as one of my primary jassi's I wouldn't have it on my desk um so you know although you could quick access that on your keyboard maybe depending on your layout maybe you want that functionality there we've got that incorporated in there but another element that's really nice about this is how we're taking audio into consideration one of the things that a lot of people have noticed on our boards for a couple generations now is our supreme effects audio design or the red line is sometimes people call it now what sometimes people don't realize is that the cable quality that you have inside of a chassis it's fairly subpar and that's just you know it's the it's the semantics of the industry where you know sometimes a lower cost has to be considered into what the cable manufacturers are putting into the chassis and that ends up affecting the DB output it brings in noise which reason which are mention is really good point a lot of people don't realize when you use front panel headers for audio a lot of times that hiss that you hear is coming from that line not if you were to take your headphone and hook it to the rear of the computer directly to the motherboard a lot of that noise is gone because it's appear yeah for sure I mean there's multiple factors of course how does it interface with the motherboards USB 3.0 I know and that's actually the the cool thing so if you take a look here down on the board if you're able to see it maybe even get some b-roll and you guys can cut it in there but this board features our isolated gridline audio design and that includes the front audio connection so we've gone ahead and used the same front audio connection that you would normally use for your chassis but instead we're connecting that directly to the front base so one we get that improvement in sound because of that isolated design and we've also given you a fully shielded cable that also is two strands directly for the left and for the right channel so right so it's not going to pick up like we have it running across the PCI Express power right here it's not going to pick up any interference in that it's exactly we're going to get a much better experience so you know if you've got a nice set of cans plus you've got a great board that's got great set on it you can actually take much better advantage of it so this is really a combination piece it's about giving you something that looks cool it's functional but also gives you definite benefits as a gamer because you're going to get better sound quality plus you also get some cool levels of functionality here we've got some switches on here so you can go ahead and do some OneTouch overclocking there's an actual escape function so there maybe you want to quickly quick drop out a game can you switch between OCC profiles in the BIOS through there you can assign an OC profile it will be linked in there so in that respect you can make an adjustment to that but it would be only for one profile specifically in addition to that of course you can make adjustments to the fan RPMs settings that are in there as well so a lot of functionality we're bringing in horse Lassie we even got a quick charge USB port so you got a tablet smartphone something like that you want to be able to quick charge plug into we're good to go and you and you said this is already available on the market it's going to be coming very soon but definitely before the end of q1 right now we're just you know finalizing in last couple of things in terms of the firmware in the software package because it is a combination of both in terms of getting everything to work right but it will work with any one of our z87 series boards that has essentially the OC panel header as well as a boards like our rampage for Black Edition so there you go guys right we're looking at here the ROG front base here from Asus if you've got one of their is the 87 ROG motherboards and it what was the name of the header again I'm sorry the OC panel header the OC panel header you can control just about every aspect of your computer here and it's a really nice looking display it's really sharp and it aesthetically looks really pleasing so guys you've been asking about how to control your motherboards if you have an ROG motherboard check see if this is going to be available for you as always guys make sure you're following us on Twitter here for all of your insider coverage at CES 2014 and as always I will see you in my next video