We’ve officially closed out our final day in the halls, suites and booths of CES and we have since taken to hashing out the high points of our week on the ground. After extensive arguing, debating, pitching and convincing, we’ve come up with a list of the five most impressive discoveries at the show.
OCZ Z-DRIVE p88
Every once in a long while, a hardware vendor creates a product so stunning that its mere mention inspires excitement and disbelief. The Z-DRIVE p88 is one of those products.
The p88 is actually the company’s fourth-generation PCI Express-based SSD but, succeeding the p84/e84, is the second retail iteration. Fitting into a PCIe x8 slot, the p88 features SODIMM-sized NAND DIMMs that can be replaced by the user when their NAND cells have exhausted their write cycles, or in the event of hardware failure.
Headed to retail in 512GB, 1TB and 2TB configurations, the p88 organizes pairs of Toshiba NAND modules into four discrete banks, each with its own dedicated Indilinx controller. The four controllers are striped downstream by an onboard LSI RAID controller.
The performance of this configuration is so fast that ATTO cannot record the drive’s speed when testing sustained transfers with block sizes larger than 512k.
Users who buy into lower capacity models can later expand the capacity of their p88 by buying larger NAND modules, or by purchasing a riser board which offers room for eight more DIMMs.
OCZ reports that retail availability will begin soon, and that the blistering 1300MBps read/1200MBps write performance can be yours for $800-$1800, depending on capacity.
NVIDIA Tegra 2
Imagine a device the size of a short paperback that can make short work of 10Mbit 1080p video streams. That is the power of NVIDIA’s Tegra 2.
Based on the world’s first dual core ARM Cortex-A9 processor, the device delivers 10 times the performance of your average smartphone with resolutions that are four to eight fold higher, on a mere 500mW of power. That’s about 20 times less power than your average PC.
To put it in more practical terms, Tegra-powered devices sip power so daintily that they can offer 140 hours of music or 16 hours of 1080p video on a single charge. Expressed another way, Tegra 2 is so powerful that it can run the very same Unreal Engine 3 that is used on the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and PC.
In fact, we watched a Tegra 2 device plow through the Unreal Engine 3 in a tech demo presented by Epic Games’ Founder and CEO Tim Sweeney. Sweeney noted that the same lighting, physics, AI and tools used to display and create the Tegra 2 port of Unreal Engine 3 were unchanged from the ones used to create the console and PC versions. Finally, he compared the Tegra’s capabilities to a GPU designed only three or four years ago; though that may not seem like much, consider that the reference platform for Tegra 2–including CPU, memory, storage, audio DSPs and GPU–is smaller than an adult male’s palm.
Boxee Box
D-Link’s Boxee Box is a softball-sized cube based on NVIDIA’s second-gen Tegra platform that comes preloaded with the excellent Boxee media center software.
Boxee is actually a fork of the popular XBMC software, but the experience has been polished particularly for the consumer space. The end result is an extremely diverse and powerful media appliance with a robust and simple interface.
From a content perspective, the Boxee Box ships with integrated support for the BBC iPlayer, Jamendo, Joost, Last.fm, NPR, SHOUTCast, ABC, Blip.TV, CNET, CNN, CBS, Comedy Central, MTV Music, MySpaceTV, Netflix, Revision3, YouTube, WB Television Network, Flickr and PicasaWeb. Content support can also be expanded via third-party plugins that are written in the Python programming language. And for services like Hulu, which have worked to block apps like Boxee from streaming content via plugins, the Boxee Box offers a browser which can run websites like Hulu without issue.
In terms of local content, Boxee can play:
- Container formats: AVI, MPEG, WMV, ASF, FLV, MKV, MOV, MP4, M4A, AAC, NUT, Ogg, OGM, RealMedia, 3GP, VIVO, PVA, NUV, NSV, NSA, FLI, FLC, and DVR-MS
- Video Codecs: MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4 (DivX, XviD, etc.), MPEG-4 AVC (H.264), Huffyuv, Indeo, MJPEG, RealVideo, QuickTime, Sorenson, WMV, and Cinepak
- Audio Codecs: AIFF, WAV, MP2, MP3, AAC, AAC+, AC3, DTS, ALAC, AMR, FLAC, Monkey’s Audio (APE), RealAudio, SHN, WavPack, Musepack, Speex, Vorbis (OGG) and WMA
Files of these types may be played locally from an SD card, an external hard disk connected to the Boxee Box’s USB ports, or streamed from a folder shared on the network via SMB/SAMBA/CIFS.
However, by far the most compelling aspect of the Boxee Box is its ability to upscale any codec the device can play to 720p. In fact, the Boxee Box is the only media streamer that we saw at CES with this capability. Popcorn Hour? Seagate? Western Digital? AppleTV? PlayStation 3? Forget ’em. With the exception of the PS3, which upconverts DVDs, none of these devices can upscale all of your movies to take advantage of the sweet HDTV you’re no doubt hooking to your streamer.
Rounding out the specifications, the Boxee Box offers HDMI, S/PDIF, gigabit ethernet, 802.11n, and RCA connectors. As an added perk, the AC3/DTS audio can optionally be passed directly through S/PDIF to an external receiver.
Sold yet? The shit-hot Boxee Box launches in Q1 for $199.
Ice Dragon nanofluid
Conventional wisdom proposes water and an antimicrobial agent for water cooling, but that convention is old news if Ice Dragon Cooling has anything to say about it. The company has developed a product that combines water, various surfactants and antimicrobial metallic nanoparticles into a solution that improves the cooling performance of a loop by 3-4°C over water. We’ve seen it deliver with our own eyes.
Alternatively, because the nanofluid reduces temperatures by up to 20% over water, loops running Ice Dragon can reduce pump and radiator fan velocity by an equal amount while maintaining a temperature similar to water. This translates directly into cost savings, particularly for the liquid-cooled enterprise systems Ice Dragon hopes to attract in time.
The fluid is the product of joint research conducted by the United States Air Force and the University of South Carolina, and represents the final concoction developed from hundreds of tests designed to identify the proper mixture and nanoparticle geometry. It works better than water because the fluid’s thermal coefficient is superior, and because the nanoparticles create turbulence that otherwise wouldn’t exist in the sluggish boundary layer which butts up against contact surfaces.
The Ice Dragon goes retail at the end of January, and has an MSRP of approximately $30 for a bottle.
CoolIT Eco A.L.C.
Let’s cut straight to the chase: We watched this sealed CPU water cooler beat a loop with a Swiftech GTZ waterblock, Laing DDC pump and a Black Ice Xtreme 120mm radiator on 1/2″ OD tubing by 2-3°C. Both setups had matching fans, and were fixed to 175W heat plates. In other words, it’s performance that’s superior to a who’s who of homebrew water cooling at 1/3 the price–just $75.
CoolIT is so confident about the performance of the Eco A.L.C. that, when asked to suggest a comparable air cooler, CEO Geoff Lyon said it was the “best $75 cooler you can buy anywhere.”
We definitely plan to test that claim for ourselves (the product is already in retail), but even the most skeptical amongst us came away astonished by the company’s side-by-side demonstrations.
Final thoughts
With several big names opting to coast through 2010 with old or disappointingly incremental products, we had a pretty rough time coming up with five innovative tech products at this year’s CES, but that makes the five on this list unique and special snowflakes.
You’d think a conference like CES would be a smörgåsbord of badass products–a billionty acres of “O” face–but it ain’t. It’s probably for the best, though, as our sparkly fantasy wallet is already several Franklins in the hole.
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