IF YOU’RE a regular SemiAccurate reader, you’ll most likely have read about Gigabyte’s On/Off Charge feature. Well, Asus is readying its own version called Ai Charge, although it seems to have some slight differences from what we understand compared to Gigabyte’s On/Off Charge for Apple devices.
For starters, Ai Charge is a software only feature and it will only charge your iPad, iPhone or iPod Touch when the PC is powered on. As with Gigabyte’s On/Off Charge, Asus has developed a utility that detects the presence of an Apple device connected to one of the USB ports on the system and will subsequently crank up the power to charge devices that require more than 500mA. We’re not sure how this is done, but apparently Asus has implemented a feature similar to Gigabyte’s 3x USB power on its motherboards, despite not making any official announcement about it.
As you can see from the picture above, the iPad is getting 1.4A which is a little bit more than what we saw from Gigabyte’s demo, but it’s worth bearing in mind that the iPad in this scenario was only charged at 25 percent, so it would be asking for more power.
Asus should be releasing the Ai Charge utility for download within the next couple of weeks, although interestingly we were told that it should work on any motherboard that supports Intel’s Core i-series processors as well as any motherboard with AMD’s 800-series chipsets, no matter the manufacturer. We’re not entirely sure how Asus can promise this, but hopefully they’ve done some testing to verify this claim. It might also work on some newer laptops, but we were told that Asus hadn’t tested this and the chap we spoke to couldn’t say it if would work for certain.S|A
Lars-Göran Nilsson
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