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lot easier for regular users to get their heads around. You don’t have to be an overclocking expert now to get the best out of your system and that’s really what these boards are trying to achieve.


Is it likely that lots more mainstream PC users are going to get into overclocking? I hope so. If you look at people in day to day life, everyone’s always trying to get the best out of whatever they’re using – whether its their car, a mobile phone. They are always looking to do more with what they've got. As the mainstream gets hold of what the enthusiasts do, and they realise they can run it faster and more productively – yeah, I don't see why not.


For those non-techie types you are trying to attract, who won't be too familiar with the intricacies of overclocking, they may struggle to get their heads around the idea why the PC isn’t shipped at its best already, so to speak. How are going to educate the masses on PC optimisation? The obvious answer is there are different parameters for every single different system. Every CPU is unique, effectively. You and I won’t have the same system and if we ask someone else they would have a completely different one as well. So it has to be tailored so people can do it by themselves, for their own system. It is something we've looked at doing – expanding the mainstreams knowledge of overclocking, and that's something we'll be looking at next year as a bit of a campaign around. We do think it can make a massive difference to our users.


Are you working with any other firms for that push? At the moment it’s just an Asus project, but there's no reason we can't get other partners involved. It’s a work in progress, really.


A general push to opening up more people to the idea of tinkering around inside their computers and upgrading could create more opportunities at retail. That would seem to play into independent retailers’ hands more than, say, supermarkets. Will this type of


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“You don’t have to be an overclocking expert now to get the best out of your system and that’s really what these boards are trying


to achieve.” Iain Bristow, Asus


The series aims to bring the benefits of overclocking to the masses, but without the need for expert knowledge. Asus’ P8P67 series boards are due for launch on January 6th.


education from vendors help independent retailers out, or could is there a danger it could actually take away business? A lot of retailers now offer overlocking as a value add, a margin maker for their own businesses. This technology isn’t going to damage that market. If anything it’s going to make that market easier for people to do. So, for people in independent


retailers, instead of spending an hour tweaking a system to get it up where they can sell it, it’s going to take them five to ten minutes. It’s cutting their workload massively. So their profit on time is going to be much, much better. Although, end users themselves are going to become more aware. I don’t think ever going to get to the stage where everyone that has a PC is overclocking, so there’s always going to be that niche.


And presumably making people aware of overclocking doesn’t necessarily mean they’re automatically going to do it themselves. Exactly.


There has been talk on some secret projects on the way from Asus – can you tell us what they are? We can mention a bit about it, but there’s more to be unveiled at CES. There’s a lot more focus on our gaming side of things. One of the projects we're looking to do is Thunderbolt, where we will integrate a network controlling chip and our audio solution together so you'll have a built in headphone amp. That’s really going to power up gaming sounds through their headphones, but it’s also going to control the packets that are sending and receiving while online. So for pro gamers, it’s going to really help. The other thing is EFI Bios. That’s


going to be a big change industry wide. I know we are going to be one of the first to implement it on the P67, but other manufacturers will as well. The transition from the standard Bios to the new EFI is again going to make overclocking possible for more people. The new EFI has drag and drop, you're allowed much more freedom in the gooey end of how it looks and how you can work with it, so I think that’s going to make life easier for people.


January PCR 43


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