Asus Demonstrates White TUF Motherboard Prototypes

Editor's Note: While Computex took place last week and all of the news announcements are behind us, we're still sorting through hundreds of in-person meetings and demonstrations, picking out just a few more of the most interesting items we saw up close.

Asus had a whole pile of new products on display at Computex 2014. Of all the prototypes we saw, two stood out.

The first prototype was a white TUF motherboard called the "Sabranco." Many folks praise the TUF series of boards for their extreme durability and stability, but aren't too fond of the color scheme. While the new color scheme isn't exactly the safest bet, it does have a certain appeal to it, and with the right accompanying components it can make for quite an attractive system. Not only is the thermal armor white, but the PCB of the board is also white. What do you think about this look? Should Asus go through with it and bring it to production?

The second prototype we found was not related to white motherboards at all. It was a storage adapter that takes a PCIe x4 interface and wires it to an M.2 slot. Other similar adapters have been spotted, but those typically support only two PCIe lanes, so this one will be able to boast much higher transfer speeds.

Pricing is unknown, and the Asus rep told us that the company wasn't sure whether it would ship the adapter with or without an SSD mounted. Asus is leaning towards simply selling the adapter, though, since it doesn't do much on the storage front. We'd be surprised if the adapter were to cost more than about $40 when it hits the market. We might even see it included with the upcoming X99 motherboards, as those don't actually have M.2 slots since Intel didn't embed it into the design specifications.

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