iPanel by Asus

This is a complete hardware monitoring solution for your PC.

It fits into a 5" drive bay and gives you a host of information that

comes in handy in monitoring your PC’s health.

Apart from the speed of your CPU, lots of other physical parameters like CPU

temperature, chipset and motherboard temperature, FSB speed, RPM of fans (both

CPU and chassis), and even important voltages on the motherboard are displayed

on the front panel of the iPanel. For overclockers, CPU speed, temperature, and

core voltages are extremely helpful parameters. However, the iPanel apparently

reads the information about CPU and FSB speeds from the BIOS. This could be

misleading as a BIOS program may not be able to catch minor variations in CPU

speed.

It also conveys important information in the form of POST (Power-On Self

Test) codes. These are error codes that tell you about keyboard errors, I/O

errors, or other factors that could be preventing the PC from booting up. So if

you pull out your keyboard and turn on the PC, iPanel will immediately display

the corresponding error code. The data cable that supplies all this information

to it is connected onto a special connector (called AFPANEL connector) found

only in ASUS CUSL-2 and CUSL-2M motherboards. You can switch between the

information displayed using the Mode button. The corresponding LED lights up and

the display shows the associated information. It takes a bit of time to get used

to, but is useful nevertheless.

The iPanel also gives you two USB ports. A USB connector cable running from

the motherboard to the iPanel gives you handy access to these ports. A set of

four buttons, called Hotkeys, on the iPanel are meant to be used as shortcuts to

start up preset applications on your PC. For example, the WWW button will launch

your Web browser; the e-mail button will launch your e-mail client, etc. You can

also program the hotkeys to launch any applications you want. This is done

through the accompanying software.

Priced at Rs 2,000, it’s not something for everybody. If you’re very

finicky about features, and want all the bells and whistles fitted on your PC,

you might like to go for the iPanel. A Deluxe version of the same is planned

for, which will even have sound jacks. However, we couldn’t get enough

information on this at the time of doing this review.

Ashish Sharma at PCQ Labs