ASUSTek has signed up Ideal Hardware to distribute its mobos into the UK system builder market.

Ideal is best known for its storage business, and it is by far the UK's biggest supplier of hard disk drives into the system builder market.

But the company is also the UK's sole AMD-only distie (parent Bell MicroProducts is also AMD only), and it supports this franchise with a range of boards hitting different price/performance segments from Gigabyte, Epox (overclocking on a budget) and Biostar (cheap cheerful, big volumes in to low price PCs). With the ASUS brand, it now has a premium mobo at a premium price.

Ideal joins three small disties - SPD, Landmark and Miniland - repping for ASUSTek in the UK.

To date ASUSTek has been a rare case of under distribution in the UK. This hasn't paid off, as the Taiwanese firm's market share is underweight here compared with the rest of the world.

But with Ideal giving the ASUS brand some welly and possibly another big distie joining in (word on the street is that Micro P is to start distributing ASUSTek too), the mobo maker should start picking up sales pretty quickly.

Ideal competes with Avnet and Arrow for AMD's UK wholesale business. The company declines to discuss its market share, citing confidentiality with AMD. But it says AMD sales are "now good", and that, aside from a recent one-week blip for the 1.33GHz Athlon part, availability is fine across the AMD line. ®