Back at Taiwan, ASUS gave us a chance to a closed door interview with their executives. A chance not many had a shot. This interview happened just after the momentous ASUS 30th anniversary event. It is closed door style, region based and scheduled to perfection. Man, I tell you ASUS really loves order and surprises.

The guests

Hot guests at the front seats are Albert Chang, General Manager of Motherboards and Servers; Sharon Pan, Division Director of Product Marketing for the Motherboards; James Lee, the Deputy Division Director and Product Management of Displays and of course, Jackie Hsu, the Corporate Vice President of ASUS. Star studded is one way to put it.

ASUS ROG Computex 2019 Interview (1)

Meanwhile, our boys are the official representatives of the Philippines media for this interview. We have Boss Mac from Back2Gaming, John Nieves of Unbox, Emmanuel Tortoza from Gadget Pilipinas and of course dear me. Suffice to say the interviewers and guests are well rounded enough to form a collective of awesome.

The low down

For this particular interview, we are focusing on Dr. Albert Chang and Sharon Pan. Albert is the man behind the ROG motherboards and is one of the pivotal elements who shaped the ROG we see today. Sharon Pan, the Division Director of Product Marketing for the motherboards also joined us on the script. One of her recent work is the TUF Gaming Alliance. A marque of collaboration between ASUS and major PC-component manufacturers.

The transcriptions you’ll read here have been edited for better readability. We’ve also cut the transcriptions from Emman, John and Boss Mac to keep things short. I would appreciate it if you could read their own take on the interview as well.

Leo: Okay, so since we’re on the topic of user experience and user input. I just wanna ask some things with particular connection to the core elements of ROG back in the days: Your ability to take criticism and input dating way back to year 2007.

For this year, what particular features or trends are you taking into consideration? That’s based on user inputs, whether it is a graphics card, notebook or a motherboard.

Jackie: I think Albert is the expert here. He could share some things with you in terms of current trend and achievements made by ASUS ROG. As for the future, he cannot talk too much. Everyone laughs**

Boss Mac: That’s a forward looking statement!

Albert: For the foreseeable future, we have some inputs on what we think what would be the best for the next generation. We also based it on the market needs or demands and even open inputs from the guys at the field. For example, major vendors like Intel and AMD wants their CPUs and chipsets to get checked thoroughly – how it will behave for the next generation chipsets, etc.

For example, CPU core counts increases from time to time. From 4 cores, 6 cores, 8 cores and even with AMD’s latest 12 core CPUs which we’ve witnessed today. With that said, we’re going to focus first on how to allow the users get the best performance or experience out of these recently announced CPUs.

Leo: Let’s take the recently announced ROG motherboards as an example. Maybe the X570 chipset motherboards. Where did ASUS got the ideas for its core features?

Albert: Since AMD had just announced the 7nm CPUs, we got to know that it features some of the best power behaviors we’ve seen so far. That said, we at ASUS have put a lot of resources on how to make the power design even better than before to support the upcoming CPUs.

Another feature is the PCIe 4.0 which ASUS prides itself to be the first to technically introduce such for the desktops. At ASUS, we are aligned with AMD to promote its PCIe 4.0 features which is higher bandwidth than PCIe 3.0.

Leo: Higher heat output too.

Albert: Yeah and the design is much more difficult than before. We have to make sure it functions alright. So, for the chipset side around that area of the PCB, we have to make everything perfect for the PCIe 4.0’s signal. That should make our motherboards be the best for PCIe 4.0 implementation.

Leo: One last question. We all know that ASUS has been leading in the motherboard segment for a long while now. I think many users know why you’re the number one, but we’d like to know from your own perspective the reason why it is the case since then.

Sharon: To be honest, product quality is one of our basic foundations. We also believe that consumers loves ASUS because we are so innovative. It is also within our spirit that we ask ourselves every time we launch a new product, what could we possibly do for the next one? We try to figure out ways to make ourselves different in the best kind of way. Maybe that’s performance, a trick to easily overclock the CPU, memory or even both.

ASUS-ROG-Computex-2019-Interview-(3)

Besides performance, we also want to make our motherboards very user friendly so we innovated a lot of features around that area. Nowadays, gamers are familiar with ASUS EZ Flash – a way to easily flash your BIOS or UEFI. That one is difficult to implement actually, even requiring ourselves to create a dedicated IC for it – now an ASUS patented technology.

Sharon: Features like these allows the customers to know that we are different, ASUS ROG is different. We try to make our motherboards easy to use, very smart and powerful. With these considered, there are actually a lot of teams working on such different areas or functions. In other companies, they would simply call it the engineering team. But in ASUS, we even have dedicated teams for power design alone. We also have teams for performance tuning, quality assurance and many others.

I think those investments tells the customers about our commitment. Some people also think that designing a motherboard is something easy right? They’d think you could easily find something and copy that right into victory. But us, being ASUS, sees that motherboards are not something about reference designs alone. We always do something very different.

Sharon: I think we will keep this kind of spirit with ASUS.

Leo: Thank you.

TechPorn would like to thank everyone who made this interview possible. That’s especially true to Albert, Sharon, James and Jackie for providing their valuable time with us.

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