*An Interview with Rick Allen, Marketing Director, ASUS North America*
ON MOTHERBOARDS, MEMORY, DDR2 AND THE FUTURE

*/What are your hottest motherboards right now?*/

The P4C800-E Deluxe is our most popular P4 board currently. It\’s loaded with features and it overclocks extremely well, especially with Corsair memory. The A7N8X Deluxe has won the Tom\’s Hardware Motherboard of the Year award two consecutive years, and is still one of our best selling products.

*/How does Asus stay in the lead?*/

We have a very big and very talented R & D team that knows how to innovate.

*/What are the company\’s greatest competitive advantages?*/

The Asus brand name is our biggest strength. We\’ve built our brand through our unwavering commitment to quality. We\’re no different from Corsair in that respect. Our customers know that Asus motherboards are always stable and reliable.

*/What hot new features are you adding to next generation products?*/

PCI Express, 8-port Serial ATA controllers, DDR2 memory support, high definition 7.1 channel audio, and Socket 775 to support the newest CPUs are a few of the new features you\’ll be seeing early this year. These are all features that will improve performance and enhance the user experience. We\’re really excited about all these new features.

*/Why do Asus boards overclock so well?*/

We have some of our best engineers designing desktop boards because that\’s where most of our business is. So we start with very solid board layouts. Then we invest heavily in optimizing the BIOS for each motherboard. And we do lots of validation testing with partners like Corsair to ensure compatibility and performance. We use Corsair XMS memory to test the overclocking limits of our motherboards because it\’s simply some of the fastest RAM available.

*/Are you testing Corsair XMS2 memory on your DDR2-based motherboards?*/

Corsair was the first memory company to deliver DDR2 modules to our compatibility lab, so of course our first generation of DDR2-based motherboards were debugged using Corsair memory. Corsair\’s strong ties into our engineering teams both here and in Asia help us work together closely to support the enthusiast market.

*/What is the company\’s growth target for this year?*/

We estimate that one in four motherboards sold last year were Asus motherboards. Despite our size and our position as the market leader in several product lines, Asus is still a fast growing company. In 2003, we shipped over 29 million motherboards, we are targeting 40 million boards in 2004. We also, expect phenomenal growth in our notebook and graphics product lines as well. Overall, 2004 will be a good year for ASUS and technology in general.