CES 2007: Wrap Up

Zalman

Zalman offers some of the best cooling products around when it comes to performance and quiet operation. They also have some HTPC specific components. We visited their display area and were surprised to see a few products not related to cooling. We found out that Zalman will be expanding into niche areas such as 3D display panels along with expanding their traditional product lineup.


One of the more memorable products we viewed is the new 19" LCD panel that features 3D viewing capability with a special set of glasses. NVIDIA had just provided a new driver that supports the 7800/7900 series cards. While it is impossible to show the actual 3D viewing effects in a picture, we were impressed for the first time with this technology. The picture had a very believable 3D effect without motion blur or stutters.



Zalman displayed their latest CNPS9700 coolers for both the AMD and Intel platforms along with their silent chipset coolers.


One of our favorite HTPC enclosures is the HD160XT that features a revised display panel, four internal and two external drive bays, ATX and mATX board support, quiet dual 80mm fans, and a very sturdy construction featuring an all aluminum chassis.


The Zalman ZM-MFC2 is a fan controller unit designed to fit in a 5.25" drive bay. Besides having the capability to control four fans the unit also offers temperature and power consumption monitoring. We found in limited testing that both of these features worked very well and appeared to be fairly accurate. It was very interesting watching the power consumption numbers as the system went from idle to heavy stress test loads. The fan controller worked very well in the test system with our only complaint being the fan setup when utilizing the RPM method instead of voltage. The controller has no idea what the RPM limit is on the fan. You will need to know the RPM specifications on the fan or set it up in real time by dialing in the fan speed adjustment in set mode. This is very minor and we recommend anyone looking for a fan controller should at least take a closer look at this particular unit.


Wrapping things up, the new Reserator 2 is a fanless water cooling system. The unit consists of a high efficiency heatsink case, water tank, high volume water pump, and flow indicator. The system ships with water blocks for the CPU, GPU Memory, and Northbridge components.

Goodbye CES 2007

And that finally draws the curtain on our CES 2007 coverage. As usual, there were literally thousands of products on display at the show, and we have only taken a brief look at a few of the items that we found to be more interesting. True to its name, CES 2007 as usual focused a lot more on general electronic devices rather than on computer specific components, but as computers continue their march towards the living room there's bound to be some overlap between the two markets. Convergence continues to be a hot topic, and thankfully we're starting to see some products that truly warrant the use of the term. Now all that remains is to see which of the products that were shown actually managed to make it to the retail market, in which of those become truly stand out devices. We hope to be able to answer those questions over the coming months.