Introduction

For the fifth consecutive year we visited the world’s largest IT tradeshow in Hannover, Germany. Cebit in 2008 was 6 days of the industry's latest product on show in over 34 halls.

We left our cozy bed early in the morning to the catch the [M] taxi at 4:00 am, after little less than 5 hours we stopped in one of the several large parkings surrounding the Messe Exhibition Halls.

Here we divided our team in two groups, this first report comes from JMke and Geoffrey who visited several manufacturers. Massman and Piotr will soon publish their news on the latest product from Cebit too.

We like to thank the following companies who made our trip to Cebit 2008 possible:

• Scythe
  
• Twintech3D
  
• FSP
  
• Be Quiet!

Titan

Our first stop was at the Titan booth, here we saw a lot of familiar products, which have been performing well in the mid-range section of the market. Their water cooled cases has gone the way of the dodo, in its place we now have several PWM activated CPU coolers, as well as a high end model.



The GT Turbo is Titan’s latest high end heatsink, hitting retail soon:



Titan is a major partner for a lot of OEM companies based in Taiwan and China, they build Intel and AMD reference CPU coolers for them, which offer better price/performance/noise ratio than the Intel reference solutions.



Mid-range product for more demanding customers includes heat pipes:



A new revision of their VGA cooler will also be available in retail, offering wider compatibility with current, previous and next generation video cards.



Titan has also several HDD coolers in their product range, low and mid-range products are passive models; the high end comes with added fans. Below you can see the passive models.



Hard disk cooling at its best. With the temperature sensor mounted on the chip you'll measure a large temperature drop by using the Titan TTC-HD90. This complete passive solution does require a 5.25 inch bay but as replacement your hard disk drive should last longer and also reduce noise. If you see yourself paying €30 for HDD cooling then you may be more interested in the TTC-HD92 which doesn't perform that bad either, although that it does only cover the hot components on one side of the disk.



Something out of the ordinary spotted at the Titan booth; a BBQ-buddy, with beer bottle opener!

Easy Touch

Not really IT related, at all, but they had a booth at Cebit with these products:



QNAP

QNAP is mostly known for their external storage devices for home and small business users, they had several units on display at their booth, the most impressive was this 4-bay RAID 0/1/5/1+0 which hooks up with gigabit Ethernet and offers tons of functionality to manage access, auto file replication, live RAID management, hot spare, and much more!



The QNAP stand alone file server. This well designed box handles all kinds of media files and can be connected to through TCP/IP. Being abroad no longer requires taking everything with you, you can now read or write files over the internet to your QNAP box which you left home earlier , the software is very complete and user friendly too.

Sparkle & Calibre

Calibre again comes up with an innovative graphic card design. This time they offer a heatsink which has adjustable fin angles, up to 45°C.



Quad heatpipe cooled Calibre 8800GT. The on top digital temp readout is the near complete version of how Sparkle originally wanted them to be.



Where Calibre is aiming for the enthusiasts looking for top-notch performance, Sparkle goes for more then decent gaming power combined with a 100% silent passive heatpipe cooler.




JetWay

An overview of the new range of Phenom compatible mainboards from Jetwau. On the left side you'll notice the high end boards based on the AMD 7-series chipset, on the right Hybrid SLI mainboards based on the NVIDIA 7-series chipset.



High-end mainboards, the Jetway Hummer series.

Coolermaster

Coolermaster 600W power supply, the ATX power connector is hard wired while SATA and molex connectors are configurable to the needs of the users. Slim cables should make it easier to hi



New series CM power supply's come with a single 12V rail, making the PSU more compatible with users who don't know how to properly load their power supply. This super high-end PSU, Coolermaster has added a mechanic relay because the traditional power switches are no good for high power switching. Now let's the hope life cycle of the mechanics isn't what causes new PSU's to go through RMA.




Anti-dust fans shown by CoolerMaster. Those fans are made of anti-static plastic and should have no problems with dust sticking on the fan blades after a significant time of usage.



A new high end CPU Cooler Hyper Z600 build for high performance and silent operation, on lower Dual Core CPUs it can be used completely passive or you can attach two fans, one at each side:




A total of 6 nickel-plated heat pipes in a copper base, the fins are aluminum, and spread out to allow one (or more) 120mm fan(s) to cool them down.



CM also has water cooling products (Aquagate) and these latest VGA blocks are compatible with latest VGA generation and can be hooked up to an exisiting CM water cooling loop.



Notebook cooler with room for connecters at the front of the laptop:



Or if you want to increase the height of the laptop screen and use external mouse/keyboard, this cooler pad is ideal:



The popular and affordable CM690 case will get an NVIDIA edition:



The internals of the CM690, new exterior design, lower budget case, the new Centurion 590;




The Cosmos case. This new series ATX computer housing are directly aimed at the gaming & modding community. The case comes with few different designs which are each produced in small series, 1000 maximum. For €900, those are yours (that is the price for one case, not the whole series).




You can also mod your own Cosmos, several were on display:

BioStar

Biostar mainboards, notice the onboard video Sub-D and DVI-I connectors.



Integrated cooling, the VGA heatsink is connected to the mosfet heatsink via a thick heatpipe, one fan is making sure that nearly the entire system is not overheating. Lower-end setups only off-course, this is not possible using the HD3870X2 video card.



Biostar P35 mainboard, performance at acceptable price, up to 1600MHz front side bus.



Gainward

The Gainward 8800GT 1Gb Golden Sample. Unfortunately, no fancy high-end video connectors, but you do get a dual slot heatpipe cooler and slightly adjusted clock speeds.



Overclocking is introducing many new product features and overclocking software is one of those, underneath is Gainward’s Expertool which allows overclocking the GPU core, shader and VGA memory clock on NVIDIA video cards.



Arctic Cooling

Arctic Cooling showed us their Accelero Extreme last year, this year we get to see the Twin Turbo, a smaller more affordable version which should still be very capable of competing with other aftermarket video card coolers. And it will be dual slot instead of triple slot.



Compared to the Accelero Extreme, you also get better compatibility:



A new product from the AC stall, laptop cooler:



And aftermarket memory heatsinks, actively cooled:



The Freezer Xtreme is looking to be quite the contender, with a 120mm fan squeezed in the middle of this large heatsink it’s bound to improve performance over earlier AC offerings.



4 large diameter heat pipes spread out to a large collection of aluminum fins:



Last but not least, a band new retail PSU with high efficiency and lower operating noise, at 550W it’s a mainstream unit, no price known yet.

Asrock

Quite a surprise showing this year from Asrock, usually known for their low-midrange products at good value, they now had very high end motherboards on display.

We couldn't believe our own eyes. Yes, Asrock is now offering triple SLI compatible products… in direct competition with their mother-company Asus:



Using a AMD chipset, Asrock is the first to showcase a mainboard which comes with the DisplayPort video connector. Well, the connector is not really onboard; Asrock is using a DisplayPort dongle to make it work.



Asrock X48 mainboard supporting FSB up to 1600MHz and DDR memory of the second and third generation. It has even a Wifi card inside the box, who would have thought that.



OCZ Technology

While OCZ main business was once memory modules, their booth main focus was not those products, they showed off their latest DDR2 and DDR3 products, using mainstream and enthusiast cooling solutions, going from simple heatspreaders, to heat pipes and even water cooling.



Answering the requests water cooling enthusiasts who used the first Flex cooled DDR2 kits, OCZ is now including all the necessary tubes and connection gear to hook up the custom heatsinks in your own water cooling loop with the Flex2. This is without a doubt the highest end memory module we have encountered yet:



The packaging has also been changed, no longer plastic blister, but a high quality cardboard box with classy design:



ESA (Enthusiast System Architecture) is making its way to the retail channel, any company not onboard with these latest innovation will be left behind. No surprise then that we saw an ESA tagged PC Power&Cooling power supply at the OCZ booth. Rated at 1200Watts this PSU can be yours for ~€400.




Memory modules and Solid State Drives go hand in hand; the latest generation of OCZ’s SSD disk will be faster than most hard drives, with write speeds at 100Mb/s!



Memory stick size has gone up a notch; maxing out at 32Gb with the OCZ ATV in the same small nearly indestructible design package. At the right side is the very fast Rally2 Turbo.



Like last year OCZ was again showing us their idea about new gaming peripheries. The Neural Impulse Actuator a.k.a. "brain mouse" has had many tweaks; the product pictured is actually a retail sample and will be available very soon. Like Piotke last year Geoffrey took the opportunity to strap on the headset and see for himself how good this product actually is. The first few minutes weren't that easy, bunny hopping all the time while ammunition was being shot every other second. With some practice it does work very good though, one of the seasoned testers show us his skills and we’re amazed about this new way of exploring the virtual world of gaming.



OCZ bought HyperSonic last year, an US based high end computer reseller, this year they will be pushing HyperSonic systems in Europe as well. We saw a few high end laptops with 8800M GTX in SLI, but also this rather compact powerful laptop; a screen size of 12.1” WXGA and Dual Core CPU at 2.4Ghz, has 100gb HDD and 2Gb ram, onboard video is ok for everything except gaming (Intel GM965).



These HyperSonic laptops can be had with SSD of course, and very fast DDR2 ram, PC2-6400 SODIMM is still quite rare for laptop memory.



Last product at the OCZ booth was this high end CPU water block, aims to compete with DangerDen and Swiftech products, the HydroFlow is near completion and ready for retail at a high end price.

Be Quiet! and Revoltec

Shhh, Be Quiet, >80% efficient power supply's which have colored connectors to make sure you don't connect them the wrong way. The PSU self is good for up to 800W and comes with four 12V rails, it is able to feed high-end gaming machines with up to 4 video cards in SLI/CrossFire.



Be Quiet is offering modular PSU designs; they come with a unique 5-pin molex like connector which makes it possible to feed more current over the 12V line.



The retail packaging of these power supplies is quite eye-catching, and unique too, take a look:



The Revoltec brand is still quite new and expanding, notebook coolers and external hard drives and compact mice all in the same theme:



But also enthusiast material like this thermal paste and quiet case fans:



HDD and chipset coolers:



Twintech3D

Twintech3D showcased custom cooled Geforce 9600 GT cards:



Another Twintech3D 9600GT, this time we found a different cooler and up to 1Gb DDR3 memory. Dual heatpipes and a large cooling fan should make this a rather silent card too, the ultimate 9600GT?



HIS

HIS, known for their ATI based videocard products, showed us their liquid cooled HD3870 series. The heatsink is a single slot full cover solution and can be easily used in multi GPU solutions. This is a prototype though, it's not clear if this product will ever find its way to the consumer market.



The dual video cards are being cooled by a single radiator which is mounted in two 5.25” bays.



Galaxy

Galaxy's 9600GT, we already had a look at it earlier.



The upcoming GeForce 9800GX2, a dual slot video card which is not only equipped with 1Gb DDR3 memory but also comes with dual G92 GPU's. The card exists out of two printed circuit boards; the main reason why it is still this large is because of the cooling this card requires. As you mat have noticed from our picture, this card has 'breathing' gaps in order to get enough cool air to the space in between the PCB's, where both GPU's are located.

FSP

FSP showed us a compact laptop charger. This device comes with high compatibility via multiple connectors and can change charging voltage via a programming button. This device comes with a high polished finish, you will notice fingerprints rather quickly on this one :)



Included is a manual to make sure you don't use this adapter the wrong way, or with incompatible hardware. From the specifications you can read that this device is able to feed up to 65W over a constant period, this means that you get lower output current whenever you increase output voltage. Laptops that have high input voltage mostly require less current, so it is nothing to worry about in real life.




The higher-end is being treated well; FSP is offering a 1250W Everest Pro Power Supply which comes with up to six 12V rails. The PSU is sold in Inox boxes and appeals very professional, but can you really pay a premium price for something that may never be of use?



The same PSU design is found over the entire high-end series, some added components will make the PSU stronger in longer periods of stress testing. Some showcased PSU's maybe never find their way to the retail market, FSP is still tweaking their product range.



Xirex

Xirex, a new company started by former Aquacool people, is about to release a new low cost low noise liquid cooling solution. In fact, the unit itself is interesting since it will offer higher end performance at low noise compared to the boxed heatsinks, and price wise it could compete with extreme air coolers. We're still talking about €80 here, but how much exactly do you pay for a high-end heatsink plus 12mm fan? The entry-level H20 setup will come with a CPU water block, a pump, a 120mm radiator and low noise 120mm fan. The block design is pretty basic, and nothing too restrictive. Main focus is price, not performance.



The block comes with high compatibility, even the socket A is being supported. The base has an extruded center circle, this provides better contact with Intel CPU's using the heat spreader.



An overview of the starter kit, a 400ml/h pump, a copper water block and a 120mm radiator + fan:



Another centrifugal pump. This one is found in the mainstream products and can easily be opened for cleaning without having to worry to get it all together again.



On top of that pump you may find the Xirex water reservoir, excellent production quality:



Xirex technology used inside Rombus PC's. Rombus is the mother company of Xirex, located in Germany.



The product below might look familiar to you. The Xirex full cover water blocks are still finding their ways to the customers, but in the future we may find TwinTech3D video cards using this kind of Xirex water blocks:



The block itself is only few mm thick and uses micro channels to get the water flowing through the water block. The connectors are small for now, European sizes, but will be made compatible with the American style 1/2" tubes. The connectors can be configured like preferred; you may all ready have seen this on older DangerDen products.

Silverstone

Silverstone at Cebit stands for high end home theatre PC chassis and innovative tower systems, this year was not different.

One of their partners in Germany had a system on display which used a Silverstone case to passively cool the whole system.



Don’t expect low temperatures, but pure silence instead!



Pretty much the same stuff, but then smaller, the Silverstone SG02W. Notice how Silverstone is using big external heatsinks to keep temperatures beneath critical levels.



Rounded etches, clean finish and good looks, the compact size and the top handle makes it easy to transport this housing. Silverstone's SG04:



Silverstone also had a pre-production model at the show. This new housing comes with few advanced options and it also looks very clean and stylish.



The case has two large intake fans, one in the front and one in top. Each intake fan comes with its own dust filter. The front filter can be easily taken out of the housing for cleaning purposes; unfortunately this option is not available with the other intake fans. We discussed this fact with a technical assistant, we might see this feature with future Silverstone cases he explained us, for now only the front fan (which collects most dust) well get the easy exchangeable filter. To top fan is indeed an intake fan. Most people wonder why it isn't an outtake, well, experiments in Silverstone's R&D department proved that the difference between intake & outtake is negligible, so why not?



The hard disk drives are installed inside black drive holders: you slide the disk holder back in place and the hard disk will then automatically connect to a SATA interface. SATA cables are also provided; cable routing is once again being improved. This case comes also with pre-applied tubing holes for those who use external heat exchangers for their water-cooling setups. The PSU is installed in such a way that it is not using any air from inside the housing to cool itself; this will make the components inside the PSU run cooler which returns extended life for the individual components.



The rear reveals the water cooling provisions, as well as a small switch, which is hooked up to the motherboard’s BIOS reset, to allow you quick access to a total system BIOS reset without having to open your case!



For the enthusiasts, Silverstone showed their newest addition to the Zeus power supply series. Going by the model number ZU1200M, this PSU is able to feed up to 1200 Watts. It comes with only one single 12V rail, rated at 95 Ampére this rail can hold up to 1180 Watts electrical power. But that's not it yet, this power supply comes with two different circuit board each containing the single or multiple rail technology. One PCB where a single 12V is being made, the other holds place for six 12V rails each rated for up 17 Ampére, the user has the possibility to choose between both PSU technology's!



One of the new Silverstone housings comes with front fan that can be very easily removed as the fan is no longer using wires to connect to the system but instead uses the interface pictured below. You don't have to worry about detaching the fan connector whenever you want to take out the fan, the interface is gold plated in order to prevent bad contact caused by oxidation.



One of the other products at Silverstone's booth, the Commander fan controller. You may question: "where on earth did they put the potentiometer?", but the fact is that there are none. The Commander series are ESA certificated and allow fan control via Windows software. The fan controller can feed up to a half Ampére at 12V, some performance 12V fans may cause the controller to fail, but overall most fans will be compatible with this product.



The Commander can take up to 5 fans and comes with 4 temperature probes:



CoolIT

Arriving at the CoolIT booth, we enter the world of high-end TEC water-cooling . First we were shown a complete setup where the CPU was being cooled by the very high end CoolIT Boreas MTEC CPU cooling kit. This system uses Thermo Electric Coolers to chill down the water; the TEC's are air-cooled in turn. Via software, this system comes with performance/noise regulation; you can set fluid temperature as low as 15°C! The Quad Core Q9650 ran at 4,6GHz using this method of cooling, insane! Pre-build inside a Silverstone TJ07 this is no cheap solution though, between $850-950



The SLI video cards also come with peltier cooling, here the TEC's are being mounted directly on top of the GPU's.



And off course, CrossFire is also supported, but no TECs here:



A picture of the controlling software:



The most interesting product for most people might be the cheapest too, the CoolIT PURE designed to remove up to 150W of heat, and aimed to be quieter than Intel Stock cooling, it has a suggested retail price of ~$135.

Scythe

Scythe introduced a bench of new products this year, which were only available as concept or prototype last year, one of them is their newest CPU heatsink cooler. Named Ninja 2, this "bunch of aluminium" has anything in house to become the new best performance/price rated CPU heatsink, the 12 heatpipes will sure come in very handy with the upcoming era of Quad Core Processing Units.




The new Orochi heatsink focuses on passive cooling, it comes with tons of heatpipes and a whole lot aluminum cooling surface. No doubt this one is the ultimate passive heatsink, but we do question the clip mounting system because this heatsink weights over 1300 grams.



Here is the original concept of the Orochi CPU cooler, no steroids used here:



CPU coolers for the masses, the Shuriken offers good performance at bottom prices.



This is new... video card cooling. AC, Thermalright, Zalman, tough competition here, but Scythe has showed us all ready that they aren't afraid to of a challenge.



The VGA heatsink comes with high compatibility:



More cooling products check the large chipset coolers which brings Scythe down to Thermalright performance, if not better:



Power supplies, not exactly something you'd suspect from Scythe. This product has been in the pipeline for quite some time, finally it’s ready for production. For now, three models are going to be launched, a 500W unit for mainstream and high-end systems, and 850W/1000W units for the utterly high-end systems and hardware enthusiasts.



Stylish external hard disk case. Branded Scythe but originally designed by the German case mod guru Benjamin Franz, Scythe also came up with some housings designed by the same guy.



The same guy is also responsible for this first prototype of a Scythe ATX PC case:


(source: Plexmod.de)

New 120mm fans are also in the pipe-line with special fine design:



The Scythe Quiet Drive will get a cheaper brother, which aims to reduce noise and temperatures:



The Kama Connect 2 will feature better compatibility, easier to hook up and comes with pouch for 3.5” and 2.5” drives!



Mushkin

First at the Cebit show, Mushkin had their own booth this year with quite a spectacle going on, a Deathmatch PC setup, overclocking sessions, and of course plenty of memory products:



We already knew Mushkin did Power Supplies, but did you know they had video cards? The 8800 GT Mushkin edition will come in reference design:



But a second version has a custom cooler and overclocked specifications: from 600/1500/900 Mushkin enhanced the 8800GT performance up to 675/1687/950, that would make it nearly as fast as the 8800GTS 512MB.



Even stable in toughest of video applications and games!



The previously quite unknown overclocker “No_Name” has been making a name for himself, breaking records previously held our Greek and American OC champs. He’s currently 3rd in the World OC Ranking, but at Cebit he was even ranked 1st for a good 7 days! He gets help at the Mushkin booth from ‘Joe_cool’, together they try to break the world Futuremark records:



With a few 300 liter tanks of LN2 they cooled down an Intel Quad Core and 2x HD3870X2 video cards several times in search for new heights, ending up 200-300 points shy of the world record.



With this chilly showing we say thank you for reading, watch out for 2nd part coverage by our 2 other reports Piotke and Massman.

Update: Part 2 online!!