MSI, the world's leader in motherboards and graphics cards has chosen Creative Sound Blaster Cinema audio technology for its new motherboard lineup. Sound Blaster is the leading brand in PC gaming audio and MSI is excited about the prospect of providing class-leading audio technology with its motherboards. Thanks to the Sound Blaster Cinema suite of audio technologies, gamers can enjoy upgraded surround sound through their stereo headphones, enhanced gaming sound effects and Smart Volume control for long gaming sessions.

When using Sound Blaster Cinema, gamers will be able to hear their opponents more clearly and easily while enjoying the competitive advantage of accurate positional audio to reveal the precise location of their opponents. Sound Blaster Cinema will first be introduced on MSI's new Gaming motherboards, on display at CeBIT 2013 in Hanover from March 5th to March 9th.

OCZ Technology Group, Inc. (NASDAQ: OCZ), a leading provider of high-performance solid-state drives (SSDs) for computing devices and systems, today announced that it will preview a variety of enterprise storage solutions at next week's CeBIT 2013 conference in Hannover, Germany. As a renowned global forum, CeBIT represents a great opportunity for attendees to be the first to see and experience the latest innovations in solid-state storage from an industry leader in enterprise SSDs, virtualization, and caching software. OCZ offers a complete suite of storage solutions that address VMware, Linux, and SQL Server platforms, and invites IT decision-makers who are evaluating or implementing solid-state storage in the data center to visit the Company's exhibit in Hall 2, Stand E43, from March 5th through 9th.

OCZ will unveil the next-generation ZD-XL SQL Accelerator, a culmination of enterprise hardware and software converging as one tightly integrated and optimized solution. The ZD-XL Accelerator addresses SQL Server database applications to not only ensure that the data for this implementation is right, relevant, and readily available on SSD flash when the SQL Server needs it, but also that the data is accessed with the highest possible I/O performance. For simple deployment and ease of use, this tightly integrated, optimized solution features 'implementation wizards' to guide DBAs so they can optimally manage data cached to the flash. While showcasing the ZD-XL solution OCZ will invite enterprise customers to become beta testers for this exciting solution.

MSI, the world-leading manufacturer of graphics cards and motherboards, is happy to announce an extensive partnership with Qualcomm Atheros to implement Killer Networking technology in not only MSI's gaming notebooks, but also a new lineup of MSI gaming motherboards. With this implementation gamers and professionals alike can now utilize Killer technology to enhance their gaming and video streaming experience. By adding a healthy dose of intelligence to the networking part of MSI motherboards a lot of work is taken out of the hands of the users who can focus better at the task at hand, be it fragging competitors or professional network services.

It looks like Intel's Core "Haswell" processor family will miss its anticipated March-May launch window, with the company choosing Computex 2013 as its next launch-pad. According to a leaked document intended for distributors and large retailers, desktop Core "Haswell" processors will launch only after May 27, before June 7, and retailers are told to hold off advertising the launch till June 2nd.

Among the products featuring in the new May 27 - June 7 launch window are the Core i7-4770K flagship product, i7-4770, i7-4770S, i7-4770T, i7-4765T, i5-4670K, i5-4670, i5-4670S, i5-4670T, i5-4570, i5-4570S, i5-4570T, i5-4430, and i5-4430S, all of which are quad-core parts. In addition, socket LGA1150 motherboards based on Intel Z87 (flagship, OC-ready), H87, Q87, Q85, and B85 chipsets, will be launched. In all likelihood, one piece of decoration the CES venue could miss, is the wall of LGA1150 motherboards, which is usually put up by Intel.

Thermaltake, being the industry pioneer brand with expertise in PC chassis, power supply and thermal solution, is launching the new reinvent CPU cooler - the "BigTyp Revo", the COMPUTEX 2012 d&i award winner, an award recognises Thermaltake being the pacemaker of CPU cooler, which also made the debut during CeBIT 2012 this March, to users and gamers who favor the down draft rather than the tower cooler.

Thermaltake BigTyp Revo is the next substantial down draft CPU air cooler after the introduction of the Orb Series and the Typhoon Series that marked a brand-new new CPU cooler era for Thermaltake.

Sharkoon has let its latest rodent loose: the DarkGlider gaming mouse presented at CeBIT is now available on the market. The Sharkoon DarkGlider is the high-end model presented in Hannover under Sharkoon's gaming input devices. Under its ergonomically designed, secure-grip rubber cover in matte black sits the latest version of the ADNS-9500 LaserSensor Sensors. The mouse contains up to a 6,000 DPI resolution, 11,750 FPS frame rate, 30 G maximum acceleration, a millisecond response time and a maximum 5 mm liftoff distance as a very precise, reliable and responsive playmate. The DarkGlider glides on five lenticular ceramic feet, which cannot afford to support any significant sliding resistance. The DPI sampling rate can be arbitrarily set and read in the illuminated LED display.

At CeBIT, ASRock already grabbed a lot of attention with its unveiling of the X79 Extreme11 motherboard. The motherboard was detailed to great lengths then. It appears like the design was still a work-in-progress, and the company has an even newer iteration. Pictured below is this latest iteration. You will notice how ASRock redid the CPU VRM. While the one shown at CeBIT packed a 16-phase VRM, this one steps it up to 24. On the obverse side of the PCB, it squeezed in chokes for all 24-phases, and compact Driver-MOSFET (DrMOS) chips for 12 (probably the other 12 are located on the reverse side of the PCB). The first iteration shown at CeBIT used LFPAK MOSFET design. A DrMOS combines up/down FETs and driver IC into a single, space-efficient package. Companies like Renesas have held interest in innovating with DrMOS chips, even compacting them further. The rest of the board is identical to the one pictured at CeBIT, except that the Creative Sound Core3D chip has the signature plastic cover over it, which can be found on Creative's Sound Core3D discrete sound cards.

RunCore, leading developer and brand manufacturer of high-end Solid State Drives (SSDs) and storage solutions, is showing a strong presence at CeBIT 2012. The world's largest IT trade show proves to be a major success for RunCore. An unprecedented amount of distributors and system integrators turn to innovative SSD solutions from RunCore for their future storage demands. As a result RunCore reached new distribution agreements to broaden market availability all over Europe such as in Germany, the UK, France, the Netherlands and the Czech Republic.

As the miniaturization in the computing will is continuously progressing, this is also the case for storage demands. RunCore is addressing this demand with their highly recognized rSSD series offering highly sophisticated small form factor SATAII SSD solutions for embedded systems. Dimensions of these rSSD are shrinked dramatically by virtue of the 104-ball FBGA packaging when compared to conventional drives, while reducing power consumption to 670 mW and offering a wide range of operating temperatures from -40°C up to +85°C.

At CeBIT, AFOX showed off the industry's first single-slot, air-cooled graphics card based on the Radeon HD 7850 GPU. Carrying the model number AF7850-1024D5S1, AFOX' creation sports a similar cooling assembly as the one on the AF6850-1024D5S1, an HD 6850-based graphics card. The cooler uses a big lateral-flow blower that directs air through a dense aluminum fin-channel array, where heat gets dissipated onto it. Heat is drawn from key components such as the GPU, memory, and VRM, using a vapor-chamber plate.

There's a small catch with AFOX' design, though. The memory amount is halved to 1 GB, although it still sits across a 256-bit wide memory interface. We don't expect a significant performance penalty for that. Further, the memory clock speed is reduced from the reference speed of 1200 MHz to 1125 MHz (4.80 GHz eff. to 4.50 GHz eff.), although the core speed stays the same, at 860 MHz. The display IO is an interesting mix of one dual-link DVI, one full-size HDMI, one mini-DisplayPort, and one full-size DisplayPort.

At CeBIT, ECS unveiled the Z77H2-AX and Z77-H2-A2X, its top two motherboards based on the Intel Z77 chipset, supporting "Ivy Bridge" Core processors in the LGA1155 package. But what ECS didn't reveal on the CeBIT floor, was that the drab-looking gray+white on black PCB color-scheme wasn't going on to the retail version. The retail versions of these two motherboards, pictured below, will employ a new black and gold color scheme.

Basically, all metallic parts of the motherboards, be it the sheaths around the conductive polymer capacitors, the sheaths around the chokes, the PCH and VRM heatsinks, the CPU socket frame, and even the rear-panel port clusters, will have golden-colored finish that lends the motherboard a pimped out appearance. The contacts in the CPU socket have 15 μm-thick real-gold plating, to improve conductivity. The PCB is jet-black, and so are all the expansion and DRAM slots, the gray and white colored slots are replaced. Most other plastic parts, such as SATA ports, ATX/EPS power connectors, are colored black. The two motherboards were extensively detailed in the older article. Sam Sparro will be proud.

Here are some key bits of information concerning the upcoming GeForce GTX 680, a performance single-GPU graphics card based on the 28 nm GK104 GPU by NVIDIA. The information, at face value, is credible, because we're hearing that a large contingent of the media that finds interest in the GPU industry, is attending the Game Developers Conference, where it could interact with NVIDIA, on the sidelines. The source, however, is citing people it spoke to at CeBIT.

First, and most interesting: with some models of the GeForce 600, NVIDIA will introduce a load-based clock speed-boost feature (think: Intel Turbo Boost), which steps up clock speeds of the graphics card when subjected to heavy loads. If there's a particularly stressing 3D scene for the GPU to render, it overclocks itself, and sees the scene through. This ensures higher minimum and average frame-rates.

Currently, Patriot Memory's SATA 6.0 Gbps SSD offering is all-SandForce but things will change in Q2 when the company will release a new drive family based on a controller designed by Taiwan-based Phison Electronics.

Found on display at Patriot's CeBIT booth, the Phison-powered solid state drive is called Magma and it features a 2.5-inch form factor, a SATA 6.0 Gbps interface, a MTBF of over 1.5 million hours, and a three-year warranty. Unfortunately Patriot didn't provide any performance numbers but it did say Magma will be a value-minded solution. Capacity wise, Magma will arrive in 64 GB, 128 GB and 256 GB versions.

G.SKILL, the worldwide leading high performance memory designer, has shown the fastest quad channel memory at a whopping speed of DDR3 2666 MHz 16 GB(4 x 4 GB) with ASUS ROG RAMPAGE IV EXTREME motherboard and Intel Core i7-3960X processor at CeBIT 2012.

PowerColor's still-unreleased Radeon HD 7970 Vortex II graphics card has finally taken shape at CeBIT, it was pictured dismantled, and without a GPU in January. We are now learning about the clock speed this card will ship with, 1100 MHz core (compared to 925 MHz AMD reference), and an unknown (but higher than reference) memory clock speed. The Vortex II cooler allows users some control over the air-flow of the two fans on this card's cooling assembly, which could impact cooling performance and noise. The cooler uses a large heatsink to which heat is fed by four 8 mm-thick nickel-plated copper heat pipes.

On the opening day of CeBIT 2012, Elitegroup Computer Systems (ECS) has presented a series of stylish and innovative products, which are not only designed to enrich your digital life but also to sustain the environment. This time, ECS will present a series of innovative designs and exclusive technologies. The cross-generation breakthroughs include motherboards, graphics cards, All-In-One systems, notebooks and mobile devices. ECS looks forward to meet you at Hall 15, Booth No. D29.

ECS booth at CeBIT - Presenting you a stylish life and innovative products.

PMC-Sierra, Inc., (Nasdaq:PMCS) or PMC, the semiconductor innovator transforming storage, optical and mobile networks, today announced that Adaptec by PMC is demonstrating a server that doubles storage performance, reduces power consumption and increases reliability in a smaller data center footprint to help meet the soaring demands on data centers while driving down total cost of ownership. The CeBIT demonstration features a RAID controller card prototype based on the industry's only PCI Express (PCIe) 3.0 capable 24-port RAID-on-Chip (RoC) from PMC, installed in a system based on the new Intel Xeon processor E5-2600 product family, and 22 Seagate Pulsar enterprise solid state drives (SSDs). Visit Adaptec in the CeBIT Storage Pavilion, Hall 2, Stand E51 to view the demonstration.

The server configuration delivers a sustained data transfer rate of 6600 MB/s in reads and 5000 MB/s in writes. This performance is made possible by the significant bandwidth advantages of the new Intel platform's PCIe 3.0 interface combined with the SRCv's 24-6Gb/s SAS interfaces and Seagate's SAS Pulsar SSDs that deliver sequential reads of 370 MB/s and sequential writes of 200 MB/s. Previous-generation systems based on PCIe 2.0 are typically capable of less than 3000 MB/s data transfer rates.

Acer ironed out a lot of issues of its flagship Ultrabook, the Aspire S3, with the revised Aspire S3-391. The revised S3 was shown to public at CeBIT. To begin with, it is based on Intel's revised, more mature Ultrabook platform specification, driven by "Ivy Bridge" Core processor, and 7-series chipset, which gives it up to four USB 3.0 ports driven by the PCH. CompuBase found the new Ultrabook to be more responsive thanks to its newer processor. Slated for the middle of Q2-2012, the Aspire S3-391 is expected to be priced at 899 €.

The fact that Sapphire has been working on a Radeon HD 7970 graphics card with an obscene 6 GB of memory has been known since the end of 2011. The said card, the Sapphire Toxic HD 7970 6GB, has already taken shape, and was spotted running at CeBIT. Such as it is, AMD utilizes 2 Gbit GDDR5 memory chips in numbers of 12 to achieve 3 GB of memory across a 384-bit wide memory interface, on its HD 7970. Higher density GDDR5 chips are not available, at least not in bulk. So the only way Sapphire is doing 6 GB is by piggy-backing two 2 Gbit chips across 32-bit wide paths, each. As a result, these cards have memory chips on both sides of the PCB, obverse and reverse, and require a metal back-plate to keep the chips on the reverse side cool. The only reason we see consumers needing 6 GB of video memory today, is multi-monitor gaming. Even there, the impact of the increase to 6 GB memory (from 3 GB) is debatable.

Shuttle unveiled the XPC Z77R5 mini-PC barebone at CeBIT. It is built into a familiar-looking XPC chassis, but with a new motherboard based on the Intel Z77 chipset, which lends it support for "Ivy Bridge" Core i7/i5/i3 processors out of the box, apart from support for LGA1155 "Sandy Bridge" processors. Connectors include six USB 2.0, four USB 3.0, HDMI, DVI, RJ-45 (gigabit Ethernet), 2x SATA 6 Gb/s, eSATA, and 8-ch HD audio. There are four expansion slots, one PCI-Express 3.0 x16, one PCI-Express 2.0 x4, and two mini-PCIe.

The chassis includes drive bays for 1 5.25" drive (such as optical drives), two internal+exposed 3.5" bays, for gadgets such as card readers. The power supply is rated at 500W, with 80 Plus Bronze efficiency rating. The XPC Z77R5 chassis measures 32.5 x 21.5 x 19.8 cm (DxWxH). Pricing and availability information was not given out.

ZOTAC International, a global innovator of graphics cards, mainboards and mini-PCs, today starts CeBIT 2012 with three new mini-PCs in standard, nano and Blu-ray form factors. The new ZBOX ID82, ZBOX nano ID61 and ZBOX Blu-ray AD05 series mini-PCs are perfect matches for users seeking a powerful tower PC replacement, home theater PC or energy-efficient PC.

A high-performance Intel Core i3-2330M processor with Hyper-Threading technology takes the spotlight in the ZOTAC ZBOX ID82 series to bring mini-PC performance to a whole new level with dual-cores for performance that can dominate much larger-sized tower PCs. Intel HD Graphics 3000 with Intel Quick Sync Video, InTru 3D and Clear Video HD technologies bring lightning-fast GPU-accelerated video conversion, stereoscopic 3D video output and hardware-accelerated Blu-ray 3D playback to the compact ZBOX ID82 series mini-PC.

March 6th 2012. G.SKILL, the worldwide leading high performance memory designer, has showcased the extreme dual channel memory kits, DDR3 2133 MHz 32 GB (4 x 8 GB), compatible with the latest Z77 motherboards at CeBIT 2012.

Working closely with leading motherboard manufacturers, G.Skill is ready to provide PC enthusiasts the best dual channel memory for the upcoming Z77 motherboards. On the MSI Z77A-GD65 and ASRock Z77 Extreme6 motherboards, G.Skill has demonstrated the 32 GB super size memory kits at DDR3 2133 MHz ultra high speed with Intel Core i7 2600K processors.

"It's just a warm-up. We are working on some faster memory kits and they will be released soon. It's going to be an exciting time" said Paul Chen, senior R&D manager at G.Skill.

A Sapphire-branded CPU cooler was spotted at CeBIT. The unnamed cooler bears a conventional tower-type heatsink design, but sports a fan shroud holding two 120 mm blue LED-lit fans in place. The buzzword here is Vapor Chamber. We already know how Sapphire has been using Vapor Chamber technology on some of its higher-end graphics cards. Sapphire's tower-type cooler is said to incorporate this technology to help transfer heat from the base to the aluminum fin stacks. That, however, doesn't mean the cooler is devoid of heat-pipes. It appears to have over four of them, about 8 mm thick. The source mentions the cooler as having a thermal load capacity of up to 200W.

Today, kicking off CeBIT 2012, SteelSeries, the leading manufacturer of premium-quality, competitive gaming peripherals, introduced the SteelSeries Sensei [RAW]. With best-in-class hardware like Omron switches, a pro-grade laser sensor and a CPI range from 90-5700, the SteelSeries Sensei [RAW] is designed to deliver the best in gaming performance. Its ambidextrous, all-grip design also features bright-white LED illumination in 3 zones -which can be configured with multiple levels of pulsation. Powered by the SteelSeries Engine software suite, users are equipped with advanced customization options and the ability to create and store an unlimited amount of profiles.

As promised, OCZ Technology is showing off at CeBIT 2012 its newest Vertex Series solid state drive, the Vertex 4. Pictured below, the upcoming SSD is based around the Indilinx Everest 2 platform, it features synchronous MLC NAND Flash memory (SLC can be used for enterprise-oriented models), and is capable of transfer speeds of up to 550 MB/s and up to 90,000 IOPS.

The Vertex 4 drive on display at CeBIT has a 2.5-inch form factor, a SATA 6.0 Gbps interface, and, according to the live demos, it delivers sequential read/write speeds of 367/305 MB/s and up to 80,000 IOPS for 4k random reads.

In his CeBIT keynote speech today, Kevin Turner, chief operating officer at Microsoft Corp., showed how Windows 8 will bring together the potential of a tablet with the power of a PC. He also invited IT professionals around the world to test the recently released Windows 8 Consumer Preview, now available for download at preview.windows.com. The Windows 8 Consumer Preview offers a more robust experience for testing the world's most popular operating system and is available to the widest range of people yet following the initial release of the Windows 8 Developer Preview late last year.

"Windows 8 will deliver no compromise experiences on a range of devices from tablets and PCs to desktops. It will give people functionality they love and the enterprise-grade capabilities that IT departments demand," Turner said. "We encourage IT professionals to begin using it to get a firsthand experience of how Windows 8 will give people a beautiful, fast and fluid experience with the mobility and familiarity they need to effortlessly move between what they want to do and what they need to do."