Taiwan Pre-CES Technology Tour Part 2
by Gary Key on December 12, 2006 12:05 AM EST- Posted in
- Trade Shows
OCZ Technology
We have already discussed most of OCZ's new product introductions in our first article but noticed an interesting item on display in their booth.
OCZ will be introducing several high performance water cooling blocks over the next few months. However, it was their prototype Phase cooling system that caught our eye. Although this unit has been discussed for the past year, OCZ assures us the unit is now in the final stages of design work and will be introduced early next year at a street price of around $400.
DFI
As one of the premier performance oriented motherboard companies, DFI has been introducing some of the best overclocking motherboards around for the past few years. Their upcoming product releases will include motherboards based on the AMD RD600 and NVIDIA 680i SLI chipsets along with a revised 975X Infinity that is probably one of the best value to performance 975X motherboards on the market today.
DFI publicly demonstrated their new LanParty UT ICFX3200-T2R/G motherboard based on the RD600 chipset. The board features dual PCI Express based Gigabit controllers from Marvell that can be teamed together, Karajan audio module featuring the Realtek ALC885 HD audio codec, IEEE 1394 support, four 3Gb/s SATA ports via the SB600 Southbridge, four 3Gb/s SATA port via the PCI based Promise PDC40719 (TX4300) chipset, three PCI Express x16 slots (1 x16 electrical or 2 x8 electrical, along with 1 x2 electrical), three PCI slots, and one Ultra133 IDE port via the SB600. The board is designed for mid to upper range overclocking, low power consumption, and true asynchronous memory speed capability. While initial testing shows this board will not break any SuperPI records, it is one of the top performing motherboards in applications and 3D gaming available today. The BIOS offers an incredible amount of tweaking options for those looking to extract the last ounce of performance out of their board and other components.
ASUS and Shuttle
As mentioned in our previous article, Shuttle, OCZ, and ASUS are working on a system that is designed around the ASUS Striker Extreme motherboard, Shuttle's custom case that will be the smallest ATX tower design case designed to run NVIDIA GeForce 8800 series cards in SLI, and memory/power options from OCZ. We will report on the final design and have internal pictures available during CES 2007.
In the meantime we had an opportunity to play with the new ASUS P965 Commando board that is designed for serious overclocking. We were able to reach a benchmark stable overclocked of up to 550FSB with 4GB of OCZ Flex XLC memory at DDR2-1100 (5-5-5-12) on 2.15V with a Intel X6800 processor. This motherboard series should launch in early January and we will have additional specifications available shortly.
ASUS also showed off their new P5N-E SLI motherboard based on the NVIDIA 650i SLI chipset. We are expecting a retail sample shortly and will put this motherboard through its paces to see how it compares to the Intel P965 chipset.
We already reported on the new Shuttle Supertuned XPC chassis/motherboard offering but we were able to play with it during a gaming session. The unit included a GeForce 8800GTX and ran just as cool as a small ATX tower case with a similar setup. We believe Shuttle with OCZ's assistance will have a winner on its hands with this unit. We are expecting a retail sample in the near future and look forward to testing it.
We have already discussed most of OCZ's new product introductions in our first article but noticed an interesting item on display in their booth.
OCZ will be introducing several high performance water cooling blocks over the next few months. However, it was their prototype Phase cooling system that caught our eye. Although this unit has been discussed for the past year, OCZ assures us the unit is now in the final stages of design work and will be introduced early next year at a street price of around $400.
DFI
As one of the premier performance oriented motherboard companies, DFI has been introducing some of the best overclocking motherboards around for the past few years. Their upcoming product releases will include motherboards based on the AMD RD600 and NVIDIA 680i SLI chipsets along with a revised 975X Infinity that is probably one of the best value to performance 975X motherboards on the market today.
DFI publicly demonstrated their new LanParty UT ICFX3200-T2R/G motherboard based on the RD600 chipset. The board features dual PCI Express based Gigabit controllers from Marvell that can be teamed together, Karajan audio module featuring the Realtek ALC885 HD audio codec, IEEE 1394 support, four 3Gb/s SATA ports via the SB600 Southbridge, four 3Gb/s SATA port via the PCI based Promise PDC40719 (TX4300) chipset, three PCI Express x16 slots (1 x16 electrical or 2 x8 electrical, along with 1 x2 electrical), three PCI slots, and one Ultra133 IDE port via the SB600. The board is designed for mid to upper range overclocking, low power consumption, and true asynchronous memory speed capability. While initial testing shows this board will not break any SuperPI records, it is one of the top performing motherboards in applications and 3D gaming available today. The BIOS offers an incredible amount of tweaking options for those looking to extract the last ounce of performance out of their board and other components.
ASUS and Shuttle
As mentioned in our previous article, Shuttle, OCZ, and ASUS are working on a system that is designed around the ASUS Striker Extreme motherboard, Shuttle's custom case that will be the smallest ATX tower design case designed to run NVIDIA GeForce 8800 series cards in SLI, and memory/power options from OCZ. We will report on the final design and have internal pictures available during CES 2007.
In the meantime we had an opportunity to play with the new ASUS P965 Commando board that is designed for serious overclocking. We were able to reach a benchmark stable overclocked of up to 550FSB with 4GB of OCZ Flex XLC memory at DDR2-1100 (5-5-5-12) on 2.15V with a Intel X6800 processor. This motherboard series should launch in early January and we will have additional specifications available shortly.
ASUS also showed off their new P5N-E SLI motherboard based on the NVIDIA 650i SLI chipset. We are expecting a retail sample shortly and will put this motherboard through its paces to see how it compares to the Intel P965 chipset.
We already reported on the new Shuttle Supertuned XPC chassis/motherboard offering but we were able to play with it during a gaming session. The unit included a GeForce 8800GTX and ran just as cool as a small ATX tower case with a similar setup. We believe Shuttle with OCZ's assistance will have a winner on its hands with this unit. We are expecting a retail sample in the near future and look forward to testing it.
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JKing76 - Tuesday, December 12, 2006 - link
Good lord, first AMD and now Intel are fully on the "performance per watt" bandwagon, when will the GPU designers join? We can have incredibly fast machines now, with lots of storage, that are still quiet and stay cool, but if you want even last generation graphics the machine becomes a screaming space heater (or you use an after market GPU cooler that runs the card just shy, if you're lucky, of meltdown).yyrkoon - Tuesday, December 12, 2006 - link
Define:Will this support 802.3ad link aggregation ? Or is this another nVidia ruse in ATI clothing . . . ?
Gary Key - Thursday, December 14, 2006 - link
I am still discussing this with Marvell tonight. I do not have an answer so let's assume for the time being that the answer is no. ;)yyrkoon - Tuesday, December 12, 2006 - link
Err whoops, "inquiring propeller heads want to know" ;)bob4432 - Tuesday, December 12, 2006 - link
i highly doubt people are going to jump on the ATI bandwagon when all they do is offer competition, and not kill the 8800series from NVIDIA. ~440W for a gpu is ridiculous, they may as well wait until they can make them work with even the enthusiasts rigs which usually have 500-600W psus in them. looks like NVIDIA is still winning since it 8800series is rather efficient compared to ATI offerings - kind of like intels presshots :(DigitalFreak - Tuesday, December 12, 2006 - link
Another person who either doesn't bother to read the article...
"We heard power consumption numbers hovering around 430~450W for the high-end CrossFire setup while under full load."
Pythias - Tuesday, December 12, 2006 - link
erm...maybe YOU should read the article.
cornfedone - Tuesday, December 12, 2006 - link
With the countless defective mobos we've witnessed from Asus, DFI, Abit, Sapphire, et al over the past several years, I'll reserve judgment on these products until the actual production mobos are in consumers hands and have been thoroughly tested.We've seen too many hand-picked review boards with special BIOS that were provided for blatantly misleading favorable reviews of defective mobos. Won't get fooled again. It's clear the PC industry has become very dirty and manipulative so it can generate huge profits thru glowing hardware reviews and consumer fraud. As far as I am concerned, nothing a mobo company claims is true until I can document it myself with a production product anyone can buy off the shelf. Anything else is hype and B.S.
yyrkoon - Tuesday, December 12, 2006 - link
*looks for edit button*"They're" . . .
yyrkoon - Tuesday, December 12, 2006 - link
Its not so much the Product their touting, as the new up coming technology that is going to be out soon. For instance, read up on the PCI-E 2.0 specification, and salivate :)~