| Tuesday, November 14 2006 |
While I was traveling the San Francisco Bay Area last week I visited the memory experts at OCZ.
There were quite some interesting upcoming products, two of which we were allowed to show.
The first is this 1 Kilowatt Power Supply, called ProXStream. It is engineered by the same team that built the award-winning GameXStream and EvoStream PSUs. What makes this unit special is that it is sized like a regular ATX PSU. All other manufacturers that have 1 kW PSUs need to use a longer case which may not fit all computer cases. The ProXStream will have four independent 12V rails with 20 Amps each.
The PSU will be available next month.
Also available next month will be this memory cooler. Even though the design is quite simple, you can see that the engineers are enthusiasts and have been thoroughly testing that design.
Inside the light-weight aluminum assembly you find two transparent fans that are connected to the motherboard using one fan cable. The cable length is long enough to go across a motherboard, so even if you have no fan headers right next to your memory, you will sure find one a bit further away on the motherboard. When the fans are spinning several LEDs in each fan light up the cooling assembly.
Here we installed the cooler on an ABIT AW9D-MAX. The cooler is mounted by attaching it to the little plastic clips that hold your memory in place. This means it is universal and will work on any motherboard.
If you look at the corners, you see that one corner is cut off. This has been done to make sure that you can mount the cooler even on motherboards with tall chipset heatsinks. When you unlock the screws on both sides you can move the upper portion of the cooler independent from the mounting clips. This is useful when you have a big CPU cooler going over one memory slot for example.
Being there, I of course wanted to see how OCZ "works". Unfortunately some areas were off-limits, but that's to be expected.
When you enter the OCZ building, you step into this room which has a nice waiting area. Also on display here are several products and awards.
This is one of the memory qualification labs. All OCZ memory modules are tested here on multiple platforms and motherboards to make sure they are working as intended.
A small meeting room. Here marketing and product engineers sit together and come up with new products.
What a cool bike! It goes to the top sales person in the company - nice way to motivate people.
There were quite some interesting upcoming products, two of which we were allowed to show.
The first is this 1 Kilowatt Power Supply, called ProXStream. It is engineered by the same team that built the award-winning GameXStream and EvoStream PSUs. What makes this unit special is that it is sized like a regular ATX PSU. All other manufacturers that have 1 kW PSUs need to use a longer case which may not fit all computer cases. The ProXStream will have four independent 12V rails with 20 Amps each.
The PSU will be available next month.
Also available next month will be this memory cooler. Even though the design is quite simple, you can see that the engineers are enthusiasts and have been thoroughly testing that design.
Inside the light-weight aluminum assembly you find two transparent fans that are connected to the motherboard using one fan cable. The cable length is long enough to go across a motherboard, so even if you have no fan headers right next to your memory, you will sure find one a bit further away on the motherboard. When the fans are spinning several LEDs in each fan light up the cooling assembly.
Here we installed the cooler on an ABIT AW9D-MAX. The cooler is mounted by attaching it to the little plastic clips that hold your memory in place. This means it is universal and will work on any motherboard.
If you look at the corners, you see that one corner is cut off. This has been done to make sure that you can mount the cooler even on motherboards with tall chipset heatsinks. When you unlock the screws on both sides you can move the upper portion of the cooler independent from the mounting clips. This is useful when you have a big CPU cooler going over one memory slot for example.
Being there, I of course wanted to see how OCZ "works". Unfortunately some areas were off-limits, but that's to be expected.
When you enter the OCZ building, you step into this room which has a nice waiting area. Also on display here are several products and awards.
This is one of the memory qualification labs. All OCZ memory modules are tested here on multiple platforms and motherboards to make sure they are working as intended.
A small meeting room. Here marketing and product engineers sit together and come up with new products.
What a cool bike! It goes to the top sales person in the company - nice way to motivate people.
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