We didn’t go to CeBIT this year. Sure, the Icrontic crew hit Vegas hard for CES in January, but despite the image we present, we’re actually not the jet setting world travelers you believe us to be. Shocking, but true! Instead, we watched our friends go to Hannover and have compiled a good list of all the cool stuff Europe had to offer, minus all the BS they had to put up with. Fair enough?
OCZ upped the ante in the SSD market after showing off the Z-Drive, a 1TB capacity solid state drive array in Raid 0 that plugs into your motherboard’s PCI-e slot. It looks like a video card, but it’s actually a controller and four 256GB drives bundled together. Actual speeds vary with some reports suggesting up to 700 – 800 MB/s reads, but benchmarks there show it to be slower than anticipated. By the time it hits the market, we think the speeds should be blitzenfast, as they say in Deutschland.
Corsair has been making waves lately with the insanely fast (and expensive) Dominator GT DDR3-2000, but they’re also getting into the case game it seems. The lack of a front intake has us a bit concerned, but otherwise the case looks comparable to Lian Li and Silverstone offerings. Here’s a video interview of relating to the yet un-named chassis. We’re fans of the cable routing features, but not so hot on the $300 price tag.
NVIDIA announced the GeForce GTS 250 at CeBIT, so Gigabyte had their card on display featuring a bigass Zalman cooler. Other reviews of note stemming from the announcement are Galaxy’s 1GB model, and Palit’s 2GB model.
On the motherboard front, Intel P55 chipset boards were the hot topic with manufacturers. Biostar and Jetway had theirs on display, as did Gigabyte and MSI. ASUS went the other way and showed their mATX X58 board, but really made headlines with the MARINE COOL motherboard which features on-board RAM, some extreme ceramic cooling solutions, and a built in UPS. ASUS stayed tight-lipped about the board and managed to piss off a few of our colleagues this year, so despite their novel design, we think they may get the short end of the stick when it comes to coverage.
Thermaltake did something different at CeBIT when it came to computer cases. Celebrating the company’s 10th anniversary, they introduced a bizarre new case called the Level 10. Each piece of hardware gets its own compartment in this sculptural design, but we have to wonder how functional it is? The neat red accents look good but might also indicate just how hot hardware gets in that thing.
No real news on the heatsink front that we found, but Scythe did show off a 200mm giant called the Godhand that deserves some attention.
CeBIT participation was down this year, so they say, still it looks like overall the showing was good, but not great. We’re still hoping for carbon nanotube coolers, Hydra video motherboards, and inexpensive phase change. I guess we can get by with this, and we’ll cross our fingers for more sweet stuff to pop up at Computex in June.
Articles RSS