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There will be those of you who remembers overclocking the way it used to be, setting motherboard jumpers and calculating multipliers. Although a fair amount of knowledge is still required, software tools are available for tweaking your hardware on-the-fly from Windows without ever having to enter the BIOS. Today ASUS plans to take things one step closer, with the OC Station… Many of the world’s best designed motherboards are created by ASUS, and they are well known for their excellent designs, build quality and innovative features. Being one of the world’s largest producers of motherboards, ASUS has a product for everyone, with motherboards ranging in price from well under $100 US to over $300 US.  Perhaps their most acclaimed series is the ROG (Republic Of Gamers), which sounds a little Star Wars-ish. The ROG series is, as the name suggests, aimed to deliver gaming orientated motherboards to gamers! Although there are no guidelines as to what makes for a gaming motherboard, things such as multi-GPU support, quality components and excellent overclocking abilities would be on the list. That said, if you look at the more recently developed ROG motherboards, they all feature high quality components, impressive cooling solutions, excellent board designs, along with a great deal of connectivity. For the most part the ROG series is aimed at hardcore tech savvy gamers with few features designed for novice users. However that is all about to change, with the introduction of the ASUS OC Station which has been designed to work with the latest ROG motherboards. So far the short list for support includes the ROG Rampage II Extreme, Crosshair III Formula, Maximus II GENE and Rampage II GENE. These boards start at around $250 US, with the Rampage II Extreme selling for almost $400 US. Therefore, regardless of the price tag that ASUS slaps on the OC Station, it is going to be far from a budget accessory. This new accessory ASUS claims is the holy grail of overclocking, as it provides instant hardware-based overclocking. The idea behind this feature is to give users quick access to system voltages and frequencies without having to enter the BIOS. In a sense this feature is much like AMD Overdrive, which is Windows based overclocking software. Although the ASUS OC Station does a similar thing, it does so using hardware, allowing for changes to be made at anytime, not just at the Windows desktop. The problem with all this is while it might sound exciting to overclock your processor at the comfort of the Windows desktop, Windows based overclocking generally sucks! Based on our experience it generally leads to blue screens, lockups, random crashes and even data loss. Can the OC Station overcome these problems to offer a safe and effective means to overclock your system within a Windows environment? |
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