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?

The large silver dial is simply labeled “OC” where there are back, okay and power buttons for turning on the OC Station and navigating it. At the rear of the unit we have a number of connectors, with the most important being the 4-pin power connector which gives the OC Station power. There is also a custom designed USB connector linking the OC Station to the computers motherboard.

Also at the rear are four 3-pin fan connectors, which will allow for on-the-fly fan speed adjustments when using the OC Station. It should be noted that the module itself does require two spare 5.25” drive bays to be installed. This should not be an issue in midsized or full ATX cases, as numerous bays are often free.

Featured on the front of the OC Station is a 3” LCD (WQVGA) display which is quite large really, about the same size as the screens found on high-end compact digital cameras. This screen means that characters are bright and large, making them easily readable from a good distance. The quality of this screen appears to be quite good, as the viewing angle is very broad meaning users do not need to be staring at it head on to make out what it is saying.

Still, for those that have their case on the ground, the OC Station does feature an adjustable faceplate with a maximum tilt of 30 degrees. When we say maximum tilt there is no in-between, so the screen is either upright or at a 30 degree angle. Unlocking the screen to view it at the 30 degree angle is very quick and easy, as the user simply needs to press lightly on the screen.

Some interesting features that are supported by the OC Station include boot debug code, alarm thresholds with audio alerts, and eight customizable profile settings. The OC Station can also be used to show images in a slideshow fashion. That said, with just a 3” LCD at its disposal, you might as well have them on your phone. Still, ASUS are trying to make the OC Station as flexible as possible to justify its worth.

Ultimately ASUS claims that the OC Station can make anyone a king of overclocking, and this is a serious statement, one that we are doubtful it can live up to. Although the OC Station does seem to offer the ability to adjust voltages, clock multipliers and bus frequencies, we know that deep down this is just another Windows based overclocking tool.

Next we booted up our Intel Core 2 Duo test system using the ASUS Maximus II GENE motherboard. This is the board ASUS requested that we use to test the OC Station, and we noticed that it was using a pre-released BIOS which we believed was used to support this new overclocking tool. Once in Windows Vista the OC Station drivers and small software application were installed and we were ready to start overclocking, or at least we thought.

The OC Station software reported that we were connected to the OC Station hardware and everything was working as it should be. However I noticed none of the profiles had names, so we quickly gave each of the eight profiles some kind of name and hit the confirm button. All seemed well, so we started to play around with the OC Station unit.

First we quickly jumped into the settings menu to see if our profiles were there and sure enough they were. However when we tried to load a profile the OC Station spat the dummy and displayed a load of gabled text. This seemed odd, so we reset the system and decided to try and change something simple like the core voltage or front side bus.

When entering the frequency menu for example, we changed the FSB from 333MHz to 340MHz, and while the setting did remain adjusted in the OC Station, CPUz was reporting no changes at all. Then we decided to adjust the core voltage, and again doing so changed nothing, and this time the voltage changes were not even remembered by the OC Station.

This time the profiles were working and we could load and save without a problem. Great so far then! The next step was to adjust the FSB, so we went from 200MHz to 220MHz. Although this was a little adventurous, as it would have meant our Phenom II X4 955 processor would be operating at a little over 3.52GHz, we have had it stable at 3.80GHz in the past. Amazingly CPUz reported the frequency change, but unfortunately it did so just seconds before the entire system froze.

Now this is where we ran into another problem with the OC Station. The Phenom II X4 955 processor was not happy at 3.52GHz and this could be for a few reasons, with the most likely being a lack of voltage. Also we were unsure how hard the OC Station was pushing the DDR3 memory. Regardless, the system failed to load windows on the restart and we realized that this was because the OC Station was applying the failed overclock.

Therefore we had to quickly adjust the FSB (Front Side Bus) setting before Windows loaded to avoid another crash. This time we decided to leave the FSB at 200MHz and adjust the clock multiplier instead. The default setting is 16x with the Phenom II X4 955 so we adjusted it to 17x and sure enough CPUz was now reporting a clock frequency of 3.40GHz and the system was completely stable here.

Unfortunately going to an 18x multiplier caused random BSOD (Blue Screen Of Death) errors and this was because we needed more voltage. Therefore we left the multiplier at 17x for now and proceeded to adjust the vcore setting. However we had the same problem with the Crosshair III as we did with the Maximus II GENE. The voltage setting was never applied and the OC Station would forget what we set it to the second the menu was exited.

No matter what we did, adjusting any voltage settings with the OC Station was not possible. This seriously limited our overclocking abilities and forced us to give up on the OC Station. The sad part is, by jumping in the BIOS for less than 30 seconds, if you know the right settings, can produce a 100% stable 3.80GHz overclock with our Phenom II X4 955 processor. Really, all that is required is a bump in core voltage and a higher clock multiplier and you are there, sadly the OC Station failed to do this.

Those that care about their Windows install should probably keep the BSOD at bay, and avoid any unscheduled resets. Not only does the OC Station fail due to the fact that it is a Windows based overclocking tool, it also fails due to lack of compatibility. While the OC Station only works with a small handful of high-end ASUS motherboards, we tried it on two of them and one failed completely while the other only half worked.

The OC Station is a cool looking device and as far as fan speed controllers go this one kicks some serious arse, though we suspect so too will the price tag, only that will be kicking your arse. The problem we have with the OC Station, apart from the fact that it completely failed to work, is its intended purpose, which is to make overclocking easy.

This is due to the fact that when using the OC Station, we quickly realized that users will need to understand what the FSB is and how it impacts processor and memory speeds. They will also need to know what the clock multiplier is, not to mention what voltage settings will need to be adjusted and by how much. Really, to be effective users are going to require quite a bit of overclocking knowledge when using the OC Station.

The point is, if you the user understands FSB and multiplier overclocking methods, understands how fast their memory can be clocked and how much voltage everything will need when overclocked, why not just jump into the BIOS and quickly change everything there? It’s bad enough that you could crash the system or run into a BSOD when testing an overclock for stability, do you really want all these problems when actually overclocking?

If ASUS really wants to make overclocking safer and easier, they need to create an overclocking operating system, much like “Express Gate” but for overclocking only. Here all the tweakable settings of the BIOS could be found but in a more organized fashion, with a better explanation of what each setting does. There could even be a facility to stress test the settings to avoid any crashes once Windows is loaded.

Bottom-line is, if you do not have the grapes to jump into the BIOS and overclock your system, then there is just no way you should be doing it within Windows. As far as we can tell, you need just as much overclocking knowledge to use the OC Station as you do to overclock via the traditional method. Regardless of the price, we feel the OC Station is one product you can give a miss.

ASUS motherboards feature world-class overclocking abilities, with well laid out BIOS configurations that are designed to make overclocking easy, so we suggest you use the blue and red screen instead.

Reviewed By Steven Walton