Welcome back to our long overdue part 2 of Cebit coverage; part 1 you can find here.

Leadtek

Leadtek had their stand in a Hall where GPS and navigation devices were dominating; their new business products include GPS capable units so they were placed far away from the other graphics card manufacturers.

They had the usual suspects from the NVIDIA range at their booth, but also a nice line-up of passively cooled models with custom heat pipe heatsinks, these silent video cards are available from the low end 7300GT up to high end 7950GT.



Their live demo systems featured water cooled Geforce 8800 GTX cards in SLI, with this egg like pump/reservoir setup:



PNY

PNY had no separate booth this year, but were showcasing their latest graphics cards at the Supermicro stand. The latest additions to their product line are the new Quadro based workstation GFX cards: FX4600 and FX 5600

Lian-Li

Lian-Li redesigned some of their more popular chassis with a different front, to include blue leds; their most active research went into HTPC cases, with compact system able to fit Mini-ITX motherboards with Quad-SLI GFX setup;







MSI

MSI was publically showing NVIDIA’s latest mid-range DX10 graphics cards, they only “forgot” to mention the actual product name, making it a bit of a guessing game.

NVIDIA 8500 GTS?



NVIDIA 8600 GT:



NVIDIA 8500 GTS MSI OC version?



They are not using the reference PCB design, because that is slightly different, below the thumbnail on the left is the NVIDIA reference 8600 GT, notice the absence of the 6-pin power adapter, this card will score ~47xx in 3DMark06 on a Core 2 X6800 system. On the right is the NVIDIA 8600 GTS with 6-pin power connector, if you don’t overclock it will run without extra juice hooked up though. The GTS scored ~57xx 3DMark06 on the same X6800 system; This makes the card slightly faster than the 7950 GT.


Geforce 8600 GT – Geforce 8600 GTS

The photos above did not come MSI, but we included them so you can compare :).

MSI has released a limited amount of water cooled Geforce 8800 GTX and X1950 XTX cards, the G80 had the pump on the VGA card itself, the AMD/ATI cooled looked more like the Thermaltake Tide Water unit.




The Radeon X1950 Pro has proven to be a very popular choice for budget minded gamers, the MSI version comes with a massive heat pipe heatsink to cool the card without fans:



Over to motherboards, a lot of Intel P35 based boards on display, with demo systems running DDR3 on the X38 chipset. On the AMD side they have a small ITX board based on the latest AMD chipset, but they added a HDMI connector for full HTPC ready action.





Intel X38 Chipset with DDR3 --- Intel P35 with DDR2

MSI dragged along an oven to demo their live motherboard testing procedure, a complete system with motherboard, CPU (with Intel stock cooler), RAM and VGA were placed inside the oven and set to cook at 70-80°C ambient temperature; the system was running stable without crashing… impressive!



For the notebook fans MSI has the latest and greatest chipsets and videocards integrated into compact designs as well as 17” wide screen laptops. Solid State drives are set to be used in upcoming models, currently they were showing their notebooks with normal 2.5” drives. Swarovski and computers normally don’t have much in common; MSI is changing that by using Swarovski Crystals on some of their notebooks:

AlphaCool and Mushkin
What do Alphacool and Mushkin have to do with one another? It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure that one out:



Mushkin is introducing their upgraded heat spreader for their memory modules which is based around a low restriction design with the help of Alphacool. An official announcement about this new heat spreaders will be made later this (or next) month.

Alphacool had the thinnest water block design seen yet on display, it cooled high end video cards, as well as motherboard chipsets, at only 4mm thick it’s surprising it works at all, but they assured us that there was water flowing throughout the water block design, and once their patent was accepted, they will make the internal design public; for now we can only show the exterior:


High end VGA cards become single slot again!


Ideal for dual GPU solutions like the Geforce 7950GX2!

New CPU water blocks, chipset blocks and compact pump/reservoir/radiator units were also shown at the Alphacool stand.



OCZ Technology

We already covered OCZ most innovative product, the OCZ Actuator with lets you play games by using brain waves, eye movement and facial expressions. But of course that was not all they were showing off this year.

If USB 2.0 memory sticks are too slow for you, how about Fire wire 800 models? The new Rally drives (v2.0) will be released soon, we got to see prototypes which fit in large and small firewire ports:



OCZ has partnered with different PSU manufacturers in the past to provide quality products to their customers, this tradition is not set to change, with their latest 1.2KW modular PSU:



On the memory front OCZ is striving to bring out the fastest DDR2 kits, the Flex-XLC series has gotten a speed bump up to PC2-11200 (1400Mhz!) at 2.35v in 2Gb kit, impressive!



The Reaper HPC series features a slightly less flashy heat spreader, but has the same high speed DDR2 chips inside:



According to OCZ the fastest 4Gb system memory you can have runs with 4 of these sticks, “only” rated PC2-6400 but at CAS3 (3-4-3) and very fond of OC:



CPU coolers are a newer area which OCZ is tackling this year with their Dominator heatsinks, the one of the left is released and should be in stores soon, the one on the right is a higher performance version:



The fins are larger to increase surface area:



But heat pipes are “old” news, so OCZ took a different approach to CPU cooling with the new HydroJet CPU cooler, this one is quite special as it combines water cooling and air cooling in one large unit; the radiators are put on the outer rim of the heatsink, while the center is kept clear for cool air to be drawn in. The motor which powers the fan also spins the water pump which pushes hot water from the CPU core through a long series of pipes which dissipate heat through the radiators. The prototype model has the radiators in full copper, which makes this unit very heavy, the retail version will be a combination of copper and aluminum; to help reduce weight:




Abandoning air cooling all together OCZ has been working on water cooling CPU blocks (with the help of Danger Den ? – check the demo stand), these new blocks will be out soon too:

Scythe
Scythe had a large booth this year marking their presence at the Cebit trade show;


Those who loved the Scythe Ninja’s passive (low CFM) cooling capabilities, but ran into size problems will be happy to learn that a HTPC friendly version will be released soon:



While not a retail product yet, another Ninja variant had a water tube running through the heatsink design, wonder what the performance of that one will be?



The Infinity was shown at max potential with no less than 4 fans mounted, while Scythe originally shipped the Infinity with only 1 fan clip, they might plan to include several in the future as demand for more clips was quite high:



Two brand new coolers were shown too, both are ready for retail and we already have them tested in our P4 setup; first up is the Katana 2, which features more heat pipes and a larger 100mm fan:



The second look like V8 engine and also features the same 100mm fan, which delivers a very good performance/noise balance; The Kama Cross has a plug and play universal mounting kit like the Infinity, Katana 2 and other recent Scythe heatsinks.



We’ve been waiting for a Scythe PSU in Europe for several years now, but Scythe assured us they are close to completion; low noise and high efficiency will be the main features of their unit:



The HDD silencer/cooler will ge an update too, the Quiet Drive 2 is still in design/prototype phase but looks to offer an even better drive muffling capability:



The Quiet Drive for 2.5” is ready for resale and follows the design of the larger 3.5” model:



Having nothing to do with cooling what so ever, Scythe had a hand crafted speaker set at their booth, with plans to “maybe” make a commercial version:

Silverstone

Silverstone welcomed us to their massive booth where a truckload of high end chassis were on display, ranging from high end ATX cases to compact ITX HTPC designs. How about this SG03 which has room for Quad SLI? With room for 2x120mm fans, cooling won’t be much of a problem:




HTPC cases for full ATX boards were plentiful, special version for the Western Digital Raptor X, complete very high end close to 3U cases with LCD display and room for 6+ hard drives; dedicated eSATA storage devices to easily hook up large quantities of drives in RAID to your system, compact cases with cut-out windows so you can see the internals, more LCD and touch screen action… all in all a very impressive showing from Silverstone who are putting forth a very large effort to become the de facto standard for high end HTPC cases.




To complement their chassis they developed cooling products, ranging from low noise CPU heatsinks, to this external water cooling unit which will fit nicely next to your HTPC chassis:



This small device adds a digital to analog sound convertor to your system over USB:



Silverstone is also known for their high end power supplies, their latest models offer up to 1200W with a single 12v rail at 90A! The DA1200 is the modular version of the OP1200 which comes with the same rating:



A modular version the 850W ST85F was on display too, offering 35A over 12v1 and 12v2.



For the completely silent setup this passive 500Watt unit called the ST50NF offers 32A over the 12v and comes with enough connectors to power today’s mid-range gaming systems:



Removable storage, 4in3 hard drive rack and fancy LCD with remote device were also at the Silverstone booth:

Sparkle

Sparkle has been developing graphics card based on their own PCB layout for quite some time now, hoping to improve on the NVIDIA reference design their cards have lower manufacturing cost and provide higher clockspeeds out of the box. Their new DX10 NVIDIA mid-range cards are no different.

They are preparing their own Geforce 8600 GT card with a rather special design twist:



What you see jotting out here is a small display which shows GPU temperature, future revision may include voltage display for core/mem:



At their booth a passive 7600GT with high GPU/MEM clocks proved to be quite a popular sale, striking a good balance between performance and price:



It’s no secret that Sparkle has partnered with MACS to develop a high end cooling solution for their Calibre series of high end cards; the P880+ OC edition has a TEC cooling slapped on to keep the overclocked core running cool:



The GTS version is also available with the TEC Cooling and comes in both 320Mb and 640Mb edition:



A very flashy demo system was running water cooled Geforce 8800 GTX cards inside a Coolermaster Stacker case which received a very nice chrome finish:



MACS/Casetek

MACS has quite a success with their TEC based CPU cooling solutions, they licensed their technology to other manufacturers like Ultra, Vigor and Titan. They have a revised CPU cooler in the works, one was shown in their demo system:



But also none-TEC units were close to release:



Casetek had a few different case designs with the most prominent being this mirror polished beauty:




It features a massive cooling fan at the backside of the motherboard; we tested this cooling system here and found it to provide “okay” cooling results.

Spire

The Spire stand was quite large this year with a variety of products being shown, going from power supplies:



Mice:



and external storage devices:



to dedicated power supplies for graphic cards: the VGA Booster up to 420W




But also fancy chipset coolers and graphics card heatsinks for the latest of NVIDIA and ATI:



Their CPU Coolers have always had a peculiar design; this year wasn’t any different, look at the one on the left where the CPU fan is squeezed in between the base and the upper fins:



Titan

Titan has been actively working together with MACS to expand their product line-up, we saw TEC powered GPU and CPU Coolers as well as their new version of the Robela ATX Tower case; They have abandoned the integrated water cooling and opted to install two large fans at each side of the case, acting as exhaust for hot air.

To demonstrate the effectiveness of the cooling they build two identical systems inside two different cases, one being a standard ATX design with in/out-take fans, the other the new Robela:



A difference of ~9°C case temperature with the rest of the components being consistently cooler inside the new Robela case which was running quieter too.

Laptop coolers have been rising in popularity; this model from Titan has 4 low noise fans and can be adapted to fit the size of your laptop:

Twintech

Newcomer Twintech had a small presence at Cebit where they showcased their latest NVIDIA based graphics card line-up. They are offering a large series of cards, either running at stock speed with stock cooling, or fully customized with overclocked shader clocks and custom cooling provided by either Zalman or Arctic Cooling:





XFX

XFX had the usual suspects at their booth, overclocked VGA cards with their G80 series receiving a special shader clock boost. But also lower range products were put in the spotlight, like this HDMI equipped and passively cooled 7600GT:



If you need more power, but still love to keep things quiet, their 7950GT will suffice:



And then something unexpected, we spotted a motherboard, their first entry, based on the NVIDIA 680LT SLI chipset this board will be based on the reference design but most likely tweaked for extreme performance :)

Zalman

The Zalman booth was huge this year, with a massive array of new products and demo systems showcasing their new 3D monitors. With a special set of spectacles you got a 3D image effect when looking at the screen. This effect can be had through special TV programming and DVDs, or when hooked up to your PC and with a special driver set loaded for your NVIDIA graphics card:



Back to their core business, passive cooling for all ATI/NVIDIA cards up to 7950GT/X1950XTX: the VNF100:




For the higher end cards an active heatsink was developed with 4 heat pipes!




Zalman has ended the deal with Fatality, so no more special editions at their booth, but a new case based on the Fatality case from last year, which is now dubbed Z-Machine GT1000. Two 80mm’s in the front:



One 120mm in the rear:



Two part door at the side:



Vibration reduction system for the hard drives (up to 4 in this rack):



And a special mounting system for hard drives at the bottom of the case, making good use of the otherwise wasted space!



This case features very high quality material and will have a price tag of over $300;

There were not a lot of new CPU Coolers this year, the Zalman CNPS9700-CU is still more than adequate to cool the hottest CPU out there. Instead Zalman is expanding their mid-range cooler lineup with this CNPS7500-CU cooler, which goes back to the flower design:



Zalman had quite a success with their passive water cooling kits, they now plan to expand to the higher end market, the Reserator XT is an external unit with a large 140mm fan in the back which pulls air over the radiators inside; the front panel displays the fan speed and water temperature.



The Reserator XT can then be combined with these high end GPU water blocks for the NVIDIA G80 series:




While walking around Cebit we noticed an amazing amount of Zalman products at different booths, their OEM deals have been quite successful into getting VGA manufacturers to use their cooling solutions. At the Zalman booth a large collection of these OEM deals were on display as well as prototype designs for NVIDIA/ATI high end cards:

ZEROtherm

Last year we stumbled upon a small booth from the lesser known ZEROtherm Company, their products have made their way into reviewer’s hand since then and gotten great feedback. This year their booth was remarkably larger and they had quite a range of new products:

Starting off with a Butterfly Fanless heatsink design, the BTF95 relies on case cooling to keep the CPU under critical temperatures.



Actively cooled copper and aluminum versions:



Compact HTPC friendly froZEN units with custom fan design:



The demo system was running whisper quiet with these coolers installed:



A compact GPU cooler solution available in silent and gamer edition (different fan speeds) with a temp-probe in the base which regulates the fan speed automatically:





The coolers above fit on all NVIDIA/ATI video cards up to 7900GT/X1900, for the new NVIDIA G80 they had a different design ready;


(not named yet)

Their high end CPU Cooler dubbed the Nirvana was on display but we were told they planned to thoroughly redesign the unit, so the photo of the Nirvana you see below might not be close to what the end product will look like:

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After running around Cebit for more than 16 hours we made the trip back to Belgium; we’re already testing some of the new products we saw at Cebit and will report back soon with our findings. Thank you for reading.