The biggest names in tech are getting ready to descend on Hannover, Germany for next week's CeBIT trade show. Manufacturers from around the globe will be on hand to demo the latest products and new ideas, but Taiwan's ASUS is getting started early.
As a pre-CeBIT teaser, it's showing off a concept that it calls the "Marine Cool" motherboard. ASUS is revealing very little at this early stage, but it's nothing short of stunning to look at.
ASUS claims the Marine Cool is "a conceptual motherboard that addresses the most demanding of usage scenarios", but we're scratching our collective heads over some of the features.
The CPU socket looks to be Intel's LGA 775, so it doesn't appear to be a high-end board for Intel's Core i7. In fact, one might even consider it to be a mobile board due to the use of SO-DIMM slots. But then, the board is said to feature "a metal heat-pipe module to provide exceptional heat transference and dissipation for core components" so it looks to be overclocker-friendly.
Flip it over, and things become even more unusual.
ASUS is lining the rear of the PCB (printed-circuit board) with a micro-porous ceramic backplate that's said to "improve heat dissipation by up to twofold".
Elsewhere, there's an on-board uninterruptible power supply, a built-in polymer battery and server-standard failover memory. This, clearly, isn't your average board. Whether or not it'll ever see the light of the day remains unknown, but we'll be certain to take a closer look when Team HEXUS hits CeBIT next week. Stay tuned.