Road trip to Germany

For several years now the Madshrimps have visited the technology Valhalla in Hannover, and this year was no different. Leaving at 3AM on a cold Thursday morning two crazy shrimp left their cozy homes in Belgium for a five hours drive.

Arriving safely they settled in comfy seats in front on the entrance, since the doors only opened at 9AM, DOH!

With a fully packed schedule to fill up two days with 24 meetings we were never bored. Our previous visits to Cebit resulted in several picture and “special” reports which can be seen below.







JMke .................................................................... Piotke

Cebit 2003 - Pic Report

Cebit 2004 - Report

Cebit 2005 - Report

Cebit 2006 - Report

Cebit 2006 - A special Report.

Right after we got back we wrote this report on the OCZ Actuator, a device which reads your minds to control a PC! There is not a lot that can top that in “wow” factor; on the following pages you’ll find the line-up of new interesting products from the different manufacturers we visited.

abit

At the abit booth we were greeted by a large podium where two system were set up for head to head death matches, Fatality was doing his thing and contestants could win small gear for small kills, up to a complete PC if their name was pulled from the hat.





Behind the podium we saw an impressive Chilly1 phase change cooling, which was being operated by Hipro5, unfortunately this monster needed 110V and Abit was unable to get a hold on a sufficient power converter, they mustered only ~750W but needed 2000W :)



Back to the business of the day, abit had a few promising motherboards on display based on the new Intel P35 chipset which features support for the higher 1333Mhz FSB processors.



The popular Quad Core ready abit QuadGT board was on display too powered by OCZ PC8500 memory sticks:



PNY

PNY were not present with a separate booth this year but send us a few sneak peeks of their upcoming professional video card range based on the NVIDIA QUADRO(r) FX4600 and FX 5600.




These Quadro cards have more than 1gb of onboard memory and are DX10 ready!

Albatron

Albatron had a wide array of products at their booth, NVIDIA based video cards were all over, ranging from the low to high end 8800GTX. However they also show support the aging AGP platform, offering GPU solutions from NV6200 up to 7800GS.




Even the PCI bus was not neglected, this PCI video card offers VGA/DVI connector/TV-Out and 128Mb onboard memory, it also a full DX9.0c Shader Model 3.0 capable card, which means you’ll be able to run Vista’s Aero interface!



Motherboard wise the P35 was present on the Albatron PXP35, as well as the new nVIDIA 680i LT chipset, which also sports the 1333Mhz FSB and SLI.



Those looking to build a small system will find the needed goodies at the Albatron booth, they had Nano-ITX boards based on Intel and AMD chipsets, the board pictured below is the Intel version on 945 chipset:



The AMD version was on display in a working system, the reference AMD heatsinks looks huge:



The I/O panel features an impressive array of connectivity options, DVI-D, VGA, HDMI(!), coaxial audio, digital audio, firewire, USB, network…



A possible use of such a small system board is integration into a device like this:

Antec

Antec had on display a few updated products as well as brand new goodies. To start off we got a look at the updated P180, aptly named P182. The changes are minor, but do impact the overall ease of use; the speed control of the fans is placed outside the case at the back where you set L/M/H.



The motherboard panel is moved slightly forward to make room for cable management near the back, a small change but will help clear up the cable mess:


Lastly a cut-out between the PSU area and motherboard area to accommodate power cables going to the video cards, with SLI configurations now needing 4 separate cables this cut-out will help you easily reach the VGA cards.


A new arrival is the P190, which is the larger brother of the P180, the case is noticeably longer and does away with the single fan exhaust and duct, instead we now have 2x140mm at the top, one 120mm in the rear and a huge 200mm fan in the side panel, and one 120mm in the front all standard.



The changes don’t stop there, in the photos above you can see a separate light which is powered from the 12v line and allows you to illuminate the inside when working in the dark. But wait, there’s more, the case comes with pre-fab holes for water cooling tubes, and will ship with not one, but two power supplies! The two PSU’s are configured to power up at the same time and run from one 24-pin ATX power connector. One PSU will take care of the CPU/VGA, the other all the peripherals, ratings for main were 650W and 550W for the secondary, making a total of 1200W!



Behind closed doors we got a glimpse at a special edition P182 which had a complete black interior and a chrome exterior high quality finish.



In other news, the popular Sonata will receive an update; the Sonata III features a different front bezel which doesn’t look like “pregnant woman” anymore. The interior layout hasn’t changed but the case will come with a 500W 80plus highly efficient power supply.



HTPC cases were not neglected we saw a new model, the Micro Fusion which features improved separation of the different heat zones inside the case, a LCD in the front panel and custom airflow path for the CPU area.



The Fusion HTPC case will also get an update to improve airflow inside for silent computing at low heat levels, as well as come in sexy black:



White is the new black! The P150 already had quite a few white panels to announce this change, the new one will further clear things up, doing away with dark colors and being more office (iPod?) friendly. The case is designed for low noise; the hard drives can be suspended and can be kept cool by two large fans in the front. The side panel features noise padding to help stop vibrations:



A four rail power supply with a total rated wattage of 1000W was also display, aptly named the TruePower Quattro it is painted with two white racing stripes; the lower rated 850W version will be colored yellow/black.

Arctic Cooling

Arctic Cooling finally let loose their passive coolers for the higher end series of VGA cards, we’ve been waiting for them for more than a year now and were happy to see the final product on display. Their test setup had two X1950XTX cards in Crossfire running at 72°C passively cooled, that’s lower than with the stock cooling!



The Accelero S1 handles higher end cards from ATI up to X1950 and NVIDIA 7950, while the Accelero S2 can be installed on practically all mid-low range cards out there from ATI/NVIDIA. For the new Geforce 8800 and ATI R600 series the Accelero Xtreme will keep temperature down at low noise levels.



A CPU cooling upgrade was on show, the Freezer Xtreme features no less than 8 heat pipes and one large 120mm fan in the middle.

Walton Chaintech

Last year Chaintech had no products on display as they were completing the fusion with Walton technologies, this year they had a large booth where they demoed their NVIDIA based graphics card solutions as well as motherboards.

Zalman seemed to have made quite a few OEM deals the past year, Chaintech was showing of their low noise models with Zalman GPU coolers:



Also a new product range was added, Apogee GT memory! Starting at PC2-8500 (CL5 5-5-15 @ 2.2v) down to the PC2-4200 speeds, Chaintech had quite a line-up of memory products; their mainstream range stood out by the original packaging:


CoolIT

CoolIT made their debut this year at Cebit, they’ve been pushing TEC based CPU coolers onto the enthusiast market as well as make some interesting deals with large OEMS; We saw their products at the Silverstone stand where they where providing the cooling for a system reseller which used a CPU/GPU TEC Cooling from CoolIT powered by no less than 8 of these devices. The demo system was an Intel Quad Core Core 2 with two Geforce 8800 GTX running in SLI. Under full load the system remained quiet and cool. The in-house developed software regulated the power the TECs to keep temperatures stable.



Over all impressive showing from the CoolIT guys, we hope to see and test more of their innovative products, like simple yet effective PCI slot and RAM coolers, in the future.

Coolermaster
The Coolermaster booth was packed with new products, from high end cases to water cooling kits and fancy CPU Coolers.

The main focus was on the newest high end chassis, the Cosmos, featuring a rather space design with aluminum tubes at the sides (ideal for modders & water cooling) an aluminum front, SECC chassis, a very easy plug and play system for 5.25” devices, six aluminum detachable HDD modules with thermal pads for optimizing cooling performance, cable management for better cable routing en neatness, a bottom 120mm fan (1200rpm) and top 120mm which is auto controlled by a temp probe.



The successful Stacker case series was present all over Cebit, being used for demo systems to show of the latest hardware, at the CM booth there were different colored models on display like this red/black one:


But the “piece the la resistance” was this Smooth Creations custom paint job worth over $1000;



The case line up extended with a series of budget friendly OEM ready cases as well as keyboard/mouse combo’s.



The new Real Power models were rated up to 1000W and modular.



Last year Coolermaster had no removable hard drives cages, but this year is different, no matter your drive size (2.5/3.5”) or connection (PATA/SATA) they have an enclosure for it, providing easy installation, cooling, and connectivity over USB, Firewire, UTP and eSATA.



Two new air cooled VGA heatsinks were on display, the Cool Viva Pro II, a high end cooler and the CoolViva Z1 which is meant for passive cooling (but also features mounting possibility for a 80mm fan)



Over to CPU cooler a few updated products made their debut, the Hyper TX 2 features a universal mounting system for AMD/Intel, while the Hyper TX 3 comes with a brand new fan which is designed to reduce vibration; The Mars 2 has gained weight and comes with a power effective fan to increase the cooler’s performance/noise level.



A newcomer is the 2*12, as the name might already give away, a large tower heatsink with support for 2x120mm fans;



A new water block/radiator/pump all-in-one kit will see the light of day soon, the Aquagate S1. The pump sits on the water block and has ceramics bearing, the tubing is 3/8”, the radiator has a 120mm fan rated at 800~2500rpm, speed can be adjusted manually.



Several case mods made an appearance at the booth, some quite stunning, others just plain weird:

eVGA

The eVGA booth had little hardware on display, but what was there was quite interesting, the Black Pearl 8800 GTX is sure to easy overclocking:



eVGA made quite a debut with their 680i series motherboard, let’s hope their LT version gets good reviews too:



The demo system was almost completely water cooled, the chipset and CPU water block are new additions to the eVGA product line-up, they’ll come with a high end 680i motherboard deal:



FSP Group

The people behind the success of many high end power supply lines had their own stand at Cebit, they were showing of their latest 1000W PSU as well as the yet to be released 1200W unit, which will be modular and sold in a fancy metal box.



The BoosterX 5 is the successor of the BoosterX 3, it’s a more powerful edition at 450W with 2x6-pin and 2x6+2-pin connectors to accommodate the new NVIDIA/ATI VGA cards. The front led color can be changed by a push of the logo.



Lastly we found an interesting no-noise 400W PSU at the booth, which is ideal for the HTPC; a universal laptop power supply adapter, the NG90 Plus, is sure to draw attention from the notebook users out there.

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Check back soon for our report of day 2 where we spill the beans on the latest products of Leadtek, MSI, Mushkin, Alphacool, OCZ, Powercolor, Scythe, Silverstone, Sparkle, MECS, Spire, Titan, Twintech, XFX, Zalman and Zerotherm.

Part two of our Cebit coverage can found here