Antec is giving the visitors a look at what is to come in the P series. The P180 will be succeeded by the P182 and the P190 comes with two power supplies with Neo-Link for a combined output of 1200W. The new P series has holes for water cooling and fan speed control switches. Besides that, the company is showing a limited edition of the P182, new HTPC & budget cases, as well as a 1000W power supply.
Akasa has expanded their case line-up to include aluminum ITX cases, as well as mATX designer enclosures. There are a few new power supplies, notebook cooling pads for every budget and a very interesting, closed loop, all in one, liquid cooling HSF in two different colors.
Aerocool has their completely new case series, which is produced by Lian-Li on display. These all aluminum enclosures come in multiple colors, feature different LCDs and even have touch sensitive buttons. They also have a new drive bay card reader with flip-up LCD up and running.
It's March again, and the IT world is coming to one place for the biggest computer/IT exhibition show in all of Europe - CeBIT.
At CES Zalman announced that they will enter the monitor market. The first product is a 3D display based on LCD technology. Initially there will be two sizes available, 19" and 22". Another more traditional new product was a fan controller that can measure the system's power draw.
OCZ's hottest announcement at CES was their upcoming 2000W powersupply that is so big that it is housed in an external case. Another promising product is their Equalizer series of gaming mice. These laser mice have a feature "Triple Threat Button" that simulates three keypresses when pressing a mouse button once. Quite useful for pistol action in Counter-Strike or to get off quick bursts.
ASUS has been showing a number of innovations at CES. For example their XG Station which is the first external video card for notebook. The 7900 GS class card lets you play modern games on your ultra portable business notebook. Another show highlight was the W5Fe notebook which is the first to use a secondary display for Microsoft Windows Vista Sidekick technology.
The big attraction at Sapphire's CES booth was the Dual X1950 Pro, which uses two X1950 GPUs on one PCB with a total of 1 GB of memory. The card that is bigger than any other video card to date is designed to give top notch performance to users of motherboards with only one PCI-E slot. Also on display was a completely passively cooled Radeon X1650 Pro.
Arctic Cooling has been in the video card aftermarket cooler market for several years. Their products are well known among overclockers and users that are looking to lower the fan noise of their video card. At this year's show they presented two completely fanless passive VGA coolers that can even cool GeForce 7950 and X1950 cards.
ECS had many new Intel motherboards in all price classes. All of them support Conroe so you will be able to play with it for just a few bucks for the motherboard. On the AM2 front many products have been outfitted with the new socket. Products are based on NVIDIA, VIA, AMD and SIS chipsets giving you the whole lineup from high-end enthusiast down to budget as cheap as possible.
Arctic Cooling displayed their new PSU project at the show. They emphasize extremely high power conversion efficiency, up to 90%. Another product was the Fusion Supporter which improves the voltage quality and stability of your video card.
At DFI the highlight was of course the new NVIDIA nForce590 based motherboard for AM2. The LanParty UT NF590 SLI-M2R/G is the first enthusiast motherboard to support Digital PWM using a special circuitry that enhances the power supplied to the CPU. Also new is an ATI RD580 Crossfire motherboard using the new SB600, a new copper cooler for the chipset and an additional SATA-II controller by Promise.
At Computex Thermalright has a prototype of a TEC waterchiller. Regular coolers can be seen too, but it's mainly sized up versions of existing coolers. New is a memory cooler and a video card cooler. Also there is a concept of a video card cooler with an external heatsink.
Thermaltake has released more products than any other manufacturer at Computex. Among the highlights are a huge home theater case which looks like a big audio rack and has space for two systems. For visitors of lan parties a Shuttle-like case is offered which takes all standard size components and supports SLI. Several new watercooling products have been announced, including a watercooled passive PSU. A whole load of air and watercooled GPU coolers are new too.
A-DATA is one of the first memory manufacturers to show off DDR3 memory. Even though it is still a while away, this is a good step to be able to deliver once the platforms start appearing - which will be sooner as everybody thought. Other new products are geared towards improving your USB stick or SD card experience. For example an SD card with integrated USB connector has been developed.
At GEIL you could see the first DDR4 modules. Also on display was a super fast AM2 rig with memory running at 1200 MHz, CL4. For users of SD cards a card has been developed which is completely waterproof and burn-proof.
At the small form factor specialists Silverstone we saw a case the size of a Shuttle which uses only standard components and has suport for SLI. Another novelty were cases which are made from only one piece of aluminum. Last but not least there was a new 850W PSU on display.
The PSU experts at Topower have been making power supplies for 20 years now. Their new products are made to improve your power supply experience. One is an easy to use cable which filters power to the video card and also protects from overcurrent and overvoltage. Another one is a special add-on power supply which can boost your total wattage by 420W each per unit added.
At Scythe we saw new CPU coolers for AM2 of course. Another novelty was a behemoth of a VGA cooler, which is probably the biggest video card cooler ever made. Another cool toy is a universal USB adapter which lets you use 3.5", 2.5" and SATA HDDs on your USB port - all with one small adapter.
Zalman had an awesome HTPC on display. It comes with an integrated 7" touchscreen TFT. The display has a native resolution of 1024x768 which makes everything crystal clear. A more affordable version of that case comes without LCD screen but is low-profile and takes up to six harddisks. The cooling products have been improved as well. Here we see coolers for AM2 and a new Fatal1ty VGA cooler.
Our Cebit coverage ends with reports from SiS, Asetek, Foxconn, Primecooler, Scythe, Arctic Cooling and NVIDIA. The highlights here are definitely the NVIDIA Quad-SLI and slides from the NVIDIA press conference.
In this Cebit report we have coverage of ASUS, Gigabyte, Elitegroup and MSI. With those names you can bet you will see a lot of AM2 motherboards. Also nice were ASUS' leather-covered notebooks.
Today we have Day 4 of our Cebit experience with the latest products from Biostar, ASRock, Sapphire and DFI. The highlights here are the various AMD Socket AM2 motherboards and Sapphire's HDMI+HDCP+Audio video card solution. Sapphire also showcased their Blizzard VGA watercooling which is based on a Thermaltake design.
In this Cebit report you will find coverage of Albatron, Corsair, Tyan, Akasa and Powercolor. One highlight is Albatron's new i975 motherboard which is designed to run with two PSUs and comes with 10 SATA ports and 7-phase CPU power.
Our second day of Cebit coverage includes the companies GeCube, Sparkle, Sirtec, AOpen, Zalman and ABIT. Among the highlights are dual-GPU X1600 from GeCube, quad-12V rail PSUs from Sirtec and overclocking with Crotale at ABIT's booth.
