Asus FrontLinker

Asus completed its line of PC accessories with the launch FrontLinker rather unexpectedly, a peripheral locating in front of your PC and bringing together a multitude of some cool accessories .

Overview and Installation
At 5.25 inches, the Bay FrontLinker adopts a facade of black plastic, circled by a silver border. Fairly short in terms of depth (less than 12 cm), the FrontLinker will slip easily into any PC case with a 5.25 inch slot free. With a cloud of wires protruding from the unit, its connection to the motherboard will be nothing but a perilous when the fastening system used by Asus is not suitable for cases using the rails. In our Antec P182, and the FrontLinker rocking back and forth, preventing its short depth to fix firmly.

As for cables, it will be necessary to connect to the motherboard with no fewer than five in any order: a Serial-ATA cable (conventional hard disk format), USB 2.0 cable (9-pin motherboard connector) cable FireWire 1394a (9-pin motherboard connector), an audio cable (standard connector type AAFP or FPA with female adapter so as not to deprive any of these audio connectors on the housing) but also a special cable for MP3-In Cable to connect the MP3 Magic -In on the Digital Home Motherboards Asus (except models P5LD2-VM DH N4L-VM and HR).

All cables are FrontLinker identified by a color code meant to facilitate their connection, that’s only if the color code is valid for motherboards Asus, it is quite unnecessary for motherboards from other manufacturers, each of them adopting different codes. Once our cables connected, it must also connect a Molex plug in FrontLinker, taken from the time of the power to your computer. If all goes well, a small blue LED lights on the circuit’s internal FrontLinker when starting the system, proof that the unit is powered correctly. He must know that the FrontLinker requires a USB power 5 volts, a prerequisite which may require, on some motherboards, the handling of a jumper (or two).

Using FrontLinker
Sort of super Swiss Army Knife of 5.25 inches, the FrontLinker offers a range of features starting with its many connectors. Thus we find in front of the unit to a USB port, always practical, a FireWire connector and an eSATA port to provide boxes most chick connector input / output directly accessible on the front. Another advantage of FrontLinker, his reader Memory Card integrated, which accepts Compact Flash cards, Secure Digital, SmartMedia / xD, MMC, Memory Stick and Memory Stick Pro other. A small green light shows the front of the drive activity when a card is inserted and it is automatically recognized by Windows, either Windows XP or Windows Vista. On the audio side, Asus has just one input for a microphone, via a 6.3mm jack, the shipbuilder apparently deadlocked on the headphone jack.

The FrontLinker seen by Windows Vista
But the greatest novelty of this is certainly FrontLinker retractable cables found behind a small hatch. Asus offers here a total of three cables with a connector cable with a mini-USB cable with an iPod connector and an audio cable to mini jack size. Used on PC, these cables are also operational PC is off and that is what makes all their charm. Because once the PC stopped you can, via the function Magic Charger, USB charging his phone or even an iPod. And the last word comes from the function that allows MagicStereo stream music from their MP3 player directly on their PC speakers, while keeping it off.

Caution, however, the Magic Stereo function is available only with certain motherboards Asus Digital Home series. The functions operate on charging them with any type of motherboard and if we could load our hassle-free USB phone, Qtek S200, this is unfortunately not the case with the iPod. Unable to effect recharging our 5G iPod, and this on two different configurations, one based motherboard Asus P5W-DH Deluxe and the other card-based nForce 680i SLI eVGA signed.

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