ASUS at CES 2007

If you’ve been looking for a phone that does far more than just dial numbers, then ASUS may have you covered. Their P535 tri-band phone is essentially a PDA, GPS, 2.0 Megapixel camera, business card scanner and of course, a phone. This gems retail price has not been finalized, but you can expect it to be placed in the $699 – $799 slot. As you can see from the picture, there is another model launched as well. I forget the model number, however this phone has many similarities to the P535 phone but lacks GPS functionality.

With the success of the Striker Extreme, Crosshair and others, ASUS has focused on developing other boards with varying price ranges that still offer insane overclockability. Welcome to the Commando. This board will retail for around $250 and has many features worthy of consideration. First and foremost, this is an overclocking board without limits. In fact, ASUS recently proved to push the FSB of the X6800 to 2,300. That’s no small feat.

The board is based on the i965 chipset and supports ATI Crossfire. It also includes such features as the LCD poster, which will give you the BIOS code that’s currently being called. This is a welcomed feature for whenever you run into a system halting problem. You just match the code to find out what it is in your rig that’s causing an issue. One of the best features may be the fact that there is a small bios reset button near the bottom of the board. So, if you fail an overclock, simply push the button to get yourself underway.

Also on the floor were two newer gaming specific laptops, one for both ATI and NVIDIA. Both of these notebooks have awesome picture quality and use the Intel 7400 CPU, so picture/performance wise you will expect the same. On the screen front, the ATI version uses a 17″ while the NVIDIA uses a 15.4″. This is purely coincidence as the notebooks are modeled differently and is not a matter of preference. Both include midstream mobile GPUs, so gaming is definitely in mind.

Pricing wise, you can expect $1,799 for the NVIDIA laptop and $1,899 for the ATI version which includes that larger screen.

Although there were still a few other products that ASUS had on display, the one that I actually got excited about was the new WL-700gE router. What makes it special is that it includes a 250GB hard drive that can be used in more than one way. You can copy files to it through the included manager, or set the router to handle downloads or torrents when your PC is off. There is also a dedicated BitTorrent chip on the board, so it should prove much more reliable than our previously reviewed WL-500g. Aside from that, there is a completely redone admin system which is much easier to use thanks to the common sense menus and also the more appealing GUI.

As mentioned, there were other new products that ASUS had to offer as well, but this list includes the one that we really enjoyed and wanted more of. Thanks to ASUS for taking the time to show us around the booth and for answering our questions. We look forward to getting some of these products in our labs to deliver reviews soon.

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