CES 2006: Motherboards, Memory, Cooling, and a Few Surprises
by Wesley Fink & Jarred Walton on January 11, 2006 12:05 AM EST- Posted in
- Trade Shows
Sapphire
Sapphire was showing several interesting new products under NDA. We couldn't provide pictures, but the new ATI video card will be launching soon. Vendors tell us that they already have GPUs and completed cards this time around and therefore, product will be on the shelves at launch. Specifications hint that this may well be the new top-end video card, outperforming even the 7800GTX 512, which appeared in small quantities in what nVidia is now calling "limited release", and which has now disappeared from the market.
Sapphire was also showing several new motherboards based on the new ATI RD480 and the upcoming RD580 chipsets. While it took Sapphire quite a while to get 480 motherboards to market, they appear committed to providing ATI chipset motherboards looking ahead. Their RD580 boards look to be very competitive with the best products expected at the RD580 launch next month.
Since RD580 is also Socket AM2 compliant, you will see even more RD580 motherboards at the AMD M2 launch. We have also been told that the M2 launch is the likely time frame for release of the ATI SB600 south bridge.
Shuttle
Shuttle has updated several of their recent products, and we visited their suite to get a look at their latest offerings.
One of the more interesting items was their updated version of the M1000 HTPC system, the M2000. The original included a Pentium M 1.83 GHz chip and two analog AverMedia tuners. The M2000 has upgraded the chipset to the 945GM, and with the new chipset comes the Intel Core Duo processor (T1400 1.83 GHz 2MB L2 at present). The added processing power should help out quite a bit with video encoding/ transcoding, and it doesn't change the thermal characteristics much. A new chipset and processor aren't the only changes, though: they have added a hybrid HDTV/Analog tuner along with a second analog-only tuner. These changes address most of the concerns that we had with the M1000; all that really remains is proper CableCARD, which of course won't come until Windows Vista ships.
As expected, Shuttle is also working on various SFF updates. They have everything from a socket 754 update through socket 775 with Pentium D support and a socket 939 unit with SLI, the SN26P. If SFF designs interest you, Shuttle remains one of the top picks for any platform, and all of their designs are aesthetically pleasing.
Sapphire was showing several interesting new products under NDA. We couldn't provide pictures, but the new ATI video card will be launching soon. Vendors tell us that they already have GPUs and completed cards this time around and therefore, product will be on the shelves at launch. Specifications hint that this may well be the new top-end video card, outperforming even the 7800GTX 512, which appeared in small quantities in what nVidia is now calling "limited release", and which has now disappeared from the market.
Sapphire was also showing several new motherboards based on the new ATI RD480 and the upcoming RD580 chipsets. While it took Sapphire quite a while to get 480 motherboards to market, they appear committed to providing ATI chipset motherboards looking ahead. Their RD580 boards look to be very competitive with the best products expected at the RD580 launch next month.
Since RD580 is also Socket AM2 compliant, you will see even more RD580 motherboards at the AMD M2 launch. We have also been told that the M2 launch is the likely time frame for release of the ATI SB600 south bridge.
Shuttle
Shuttle has updated several of their recent products, and we visited their suite to get a look at their latest offerings.
One of the more interesting items was their updated version of the M1000 HTPC system, the M2000. The original included a Pentium M 1.83 GHz chip and two analog AverMedia tuners. The M2000 has upgraded the chipset to the 945GM, and with the new chipset comes the Intel Core Duo processor (T1400 1.83 GHz 2MB L2 at present). The added processing power should help out quite a bit with video encoding/ transcoding, and it doesn't change the thermal characteristics much. A new chipset and processor aren't the only changes, though: they have added a hybrid HDTV/Analog tuner along with a second analog-only tuner. These changes address most of the concerns that we had with the M1000; all that really remains is proper CableCARD, which of course won't come until Windows Vista ships.
As expected, Shuttle is also working on various SFF updates. They have everything from a socket 754 update through socket 775 with Pentium D support and a socket 939 unit with SLI, the SN26P. If SFF designs interest you, Shuttle remains one of the top picks for any platform, and all of their designs are aesthetically pleasing.
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semo - Wednesday, January 11, 2006 - link
am i the only one annoyed of the fact that the graphics card is almost always ignored when it comes to exotic cooling.why no phase change cooling option for you graphics card? and not just the gpu i'm talking about the memory aswell. pc ram may not get very hot but gddr does.
Puddleglum - Wednesday, January 11, 2006 - link
Check this image: http://images.anandtech.com/reviews/tradeshows/200...">http://images.anandtech.com/reviews/tra...ows/2006...Turin39789 - Wednesday, January 11, 2006 - link
Now that just needs to drop to $299 and we'll be all setTurin39789 - Wednesday, January 11, 2006 - link
This was the problem I saw with the ocz phase change setup. It seemed very nice for extreme cpu speeds, but it would be nice if they offered an expanded system that had cooling for other system componentsJynx980 - Wednesday, January 11, 2006 - link
Can you imagine being the one responsible for getting that $50,000 Brightside TV to the show and then f-cking it up?!"Oooooh, sorry guys, my bad."
JustAnAverageGuy - Wednesday, January 11, 2006 - link
OUCH! That's gotta suck.
JarredWalton - Wednesday, January 11, 2006 - link
Supposedly was the shipping company. That's a hefty insurance bill, I'd wager. It was pretty awesome to see true black from such a crisp LCD, though. They had Doom 3 shots and some other stuff running, and it was all very impressive looking. Hopefully, we can see something get into the market like this in the next year!DigitalDivine - Wednesday, January 11, 2006 - link
i like the tiny dualcor computer. if it has a vga out and usb in, this will be a winner and i would get one as fast as i can.Wesley Fink - Wednesday, January 11, 2006 - link
According to the Specifications, the DualCor has 3 USB 2.0 ports (2 type A and 1 type B), a mini VGA port, and a compact Flash slot. It also has both 1GB of DDR2 Memory and 1GB of Flash Memory. It looks like your wishes are all there.JarredWalton - Wednesday, January 11, 2006 - link
They had it hooked to an LCD, but I don't know if it can run non-native resolutions or not. (Probably a driver update will be required, as at the show it was only outputting 800x480.) It looks like the unit is in early Beta to me, but it's still pretty interesting. Getting 40GB of easily accessible storage for your PDA is nice.