Asus Poseidon Formula One PC takes “Bare Bones” concept literally

Asus introduced several new components during its Computex Republic of Gamers press conference, but the highlight of the event was when the astonishing Poseidon Formula One PC to show then all in action together.

At the heart of the open-frame chassis, which looks more like the roll cage of a racing car than a PC case, the new Maximus VI motherboard, which is built for taking Intel’s 4th Generation Core processors (previously known as Haswell) to the absolute limit. A completely redesigned cooling system keeps the system to temperature on air, but extreme overclockers can add water-cooling without needing to dismantle the board. Asus says that adding a water-cooling loop will reduce temperatures by as much as 23 degrees across the board, allowing for greater overlocks.

The board also incudes a refined SupremeFX audio chip, which includes high quality WIMA and ELNA audio capacitors, OpAMP and EMI shielding to reduce interference and a 600 ohm headphone amplifier, which raises the headphone output to a massive 120dB SNR. 802.11ac Wi-Fi is included on a mPCIe plugin card, which also adds Bluetooth 4.0 support.

The Poseidon Formula One is also the poster-child for the new Asus Poseidon graphics card. It’s based around an as-yet unannounced Nvidia GeForec 700-series GPU, with a hybrid cooling system that incorporates a water-cooling loop into the heatsink design, letting anyone use the card in air cooled mode but advanced users quickly add it into a water-cooling system. The CoolTech fan combines blower and axial fans into a single unit, which forces air over the heatsink in multiple directions for more effective cooling.

Quite whether Asus actually plans to sell the Poseidon Formula One PC remains to be seen – the representatives we spoke to following the event wouldn’t say either way. The motherboard and graphics cards, however, will be on sale over the coming months.