ASRock Haswell HDMI Pass-thru adds flexibility to gaming battle stations

Hardware

May 18, 2013

ASRock is flooding the Internet with all kinds of cool stuff they’ve been working on, and with their new Haswell motherboards, it seems they now have shoved in HDMI Pass-thru technology.

ASRock has developed a way to use an HDMI-in port to share your screen from your tablet, cellphone or any other compatible device, even while the PC is powered off. Check it out:

ASRock hasn’t said how this works, but we can guess how it works up to a point. If the PC is powered off but still supplied with power, it’s likely using the built-in GPU on the processor die to pass through the information while drawing less than a watt. Intel’s Haswell is said to support some very deep sleep states and its possible that this allows use of the GPU while in sleep mode, if only for a simple thing like video transfer.

ASRock has said before that it intends on shipping more motherboards and possibly even dominating the market this year. They will be exiting the starting gate in the Haswell race at the same time as the other competitors this year and with products and technologies like this, they may just achieve their goal.

What good could this be to ASRock owners? Well, you could connect up your console to the HDMI-in port and use it on the same screen, which is damn useful if your screen only has one HDMI port. Tablets, handheld consoles like the PS Vita, and even video cameras would all work and give you real-time video displays. If the technology supports video capture, you could possibly even rig it to stream your gameplay.