(updated: We’ve updated the price of the Asus Essentio Desktops. The prices in the article have been updated to the corrected price)
Last Friday, Asus held one of its Technical Seminars. These seminars offers select members of the Asus Enthusiast Community an overview of their open systems (PC components) offering as well as the opportunity for them to ask Asus questions.
All of the products that were shown at the seminar were for AMD CPUs especially for AMD’s Llano APUs except for one product. Asus unveiled their Essentio Desktops sporting Intel Sandy Bridge CPUs. Asus is positioning these desktops for the HTPC market. The Essentio will sport an Intel i3 2100 for its base model for PhP31,995 or for around PhP2,000 more, you can get the one in at the Seminar which has an i5 2300 CPU at PhP32,995. The Essentio line comes with EFI BIOS, 2GBs of RAM, 500GBs of storage, multimedia keyboard, Blue Trace mouse, optical disc drive, and a 20” LED monitor. The desktop has a front panel with a 4-in-1 card reader, audio in and out jacks, and 2 USB 2.0 ports. The rear panel has a PS/2 port, Gb Ethernet, 8 channel audio, HDMI, VGA, S/PDIF, 2 USB 3.0 and 4 USB 2.0 ports.
With software, the Essentio comes with Windows 7 Home Basic, PC-Cillian 2011, Nero 9 Essential, Asus @vibe for multimedia selection, as well as unlimited online storage for 1 year through the Asus Webstorage.
Asus also announced the F1A75 line of motherboards that support AMD’s FM1 socket for the Llano Fusion APUs. Asus previewed this board in their last Technical Seminar a few months ago but now we actually got to a more complete overview of the F1A75 boards.
The boards will have 6 SATA 6Gb/s port and 4 USB 3.0 ports on the board. While the boards do not have an integrated GPU, they do have video out through HDMI, DVI, or D-SUB because of the Radeon 6000 series GPU built into the Llano APUs themselves. The GPU has DirectX 11 support while the CPU portion will have AMD’s Turbo Core 2.0 which will overclock its cores when it detects heave processing. The F1A75 boards also support AMD’s CrossFireX for dual GPUs.
While all these are standard with most FM1 boards, Asus has added a few more features such as its own Dual Intelligent Processors 2 with DIGI+ VRM for precise power controls that offered power efficiency and clean power input as well as UEFI BIOS for more user-friendly BIOS controls and features.
Asus has stated that the M-Pro, M-LE, and the V-EVO will arrive soon and will cost PhP5,990, PhP4,990, and PhP6,990 respectively.
