Asus Republic of Gamers OC Station control box
Bios tinkering made simple and sweet?
Review The Republic of Gamers OC Station is an intriguing motherboard accessory that works as a control centre for your mobo without any of that nasty Bios business. It also handles overclocking duties. That’s what the OC stands for, see?
Asus' Republic of Gamers OC Station: inspired by Polaroid - or a car radio?
The OC Station fits into a pair of external 5.25in inch drive bays and connects by cable to a compatible RoG motherboard. That’s Rampage II (Core i7 on X58), Maximus II (Core 2 on P45) and Crosshair III (Phenom on AMD 790FX) so you need to think of the OC Station as part of your new PC build rather than as an upgrade for your existing PC. The data cable connects to one of the on-board USB headers and also to a special connector that has been added to the new Republic of Gamer boards.
Plug a four-pin Molex cable in the back of the OC Station to provide power, run the USB driver and you’re ready for action.
From a cosmetic stance, the OC Station looks very smart, with three control buttons (OK, Back and Power) arranged under a large aluminium control wheel. When the screen is off, the front panel is dark. Then, when you press the Power button, the 3in mono screen bursts into life. It's bright and clear, with a decent resolution. It can display six options on the main menu that cover Voltage, Frequency, Fan Speed, Temperature, Performance and Setting.
Asus has worked around the obvious problem that many tower cases sit at floor level which would make the screen difficult to read. Press the panel and it swings up through an arc of 30°, sufficient for you to find a good viewing angle.
Dial up your Bios settings
Select Voltage or Frequency and you are effectively in the Bios, where you can select and change settings with a spin (or three) of the knob. Scroll down to RAM Voltage, for example, hit Select to choose it, turn the voltage up or down, press the OK button and the change is made. Windows gets confused by dynamic changes to CPU speed and continues to report the old speed, but the CPU-Z utility confirms that the changes we made took effect immediately.
COMMENTS
Deeply, deeply cool....
....whilst at the same time being utterly pointless. Perfect!
No surprise there, then
There should be one toggle: 'overclock on/off'. For the users that aren't risk averse, this should find a decent overclock with a sensible safety margin to cope with changes in temperature, and stay there. A couple of motherboards do this, but don't get enough publicity because people obviously prefer to waste their time fiddling and it doesn't sell useless product.
Dare I suggest there's better ways to waste life than getting 3fps extra in MegaDeathNinjaBiscuit2?
Can you next pull up 98% of fan controllers for being bullshit? They're the same flashy gimmick.
A *decent* fan controller should automatically control speeds without the user having to be there. There are currently only about four of these on the market, but the ones with flashy lights always win despite the user having to tweak them manually..
missed the point....
I don't think it's meant to be useful (like perspex case cutouts or neon-glow hard drive cables)...I think it's meant to be really really cool, which it dosn't do too bad a job at by the look of it.
oh dear
i can just imagine comming home and findin out my cpu is crispy because the kids were playing with it
ahh, finally
This is where most PC manufacturers go wrong, we actually want lots of buttons, knobs and dials on the front to twiddle with.
