CES Las Vegas - Day 2
Tuesday, January 8th

     We got off to a late start on Tuesday.  Come to find out, we're old and just can't party until 2 am and get up at 7am anymore.  Day 2 took us to the Sands convention center inside the Venetian.  It's not as large as the LVCC, but it still took us all day to look around.

Team Xtreem 

Team Xtreem was showing off some of the fastest DDR3 that we've seen at CES.  This stuff burns past everything else at 2133MHz.  In order to get that speed though, they had to use CAS 10-10-10-30 and the voltage is between 2.1v and 2.2v.  This is pretty high for DDR3.  We looked at several memory manufacturers booth's and this seemed to be the norm.  They tried to get the memory as fast as possible by sacrificing timings and voltage.  All of the memory that we saw that was over 2000MHz was at least CAS 9.  Team Xtreem, A-data, SuperTalent and Kingmax all displayed memory over 2000MHz.  Kingmax had the best timings with 9-9-9-24 at 2000 MHz and 2.15v.

Lian Li      Lian Li's bright red case caught our attention next.  It was in honor of AMD/ATI's new spider platform.  The cases were decked out with a new AMD Phenom quad core CPU along with a couple of 3800 video cards.  Lian-Li had the computers hooked up and was letting people game with them.  The game play was pretty smooth.  However we quickly got distracted by a small computer case hooked up to a large screen TV.  The computer case had Xbox 360 game controllers hooked up to it.  This definitely required a closer inspection.  The computer case turned out to be a prototype Xbox 360 case.  The case is made of all aluminum and has a side window.  The all aluminum design should help with any heat issues and there is plenty of room for additional cooling.  Of course, you would have to void your warranty by transferring the contents of your 360 into this case.

Click on the images for a larger view

Enermax      One of the more interesting displays belonged to Enermax.  Enermax was one of the first power supply companies to bring us the massive 1000w+ power supplies.  That's what made this display even more interesting.  The new Modu82+ power supply was on display.  It's just a measly 625w power supply but it was powering 16 SATA HDD's, 4 AMD dual core CPU's, 16GB of RAM and a pair of video cards all on a Tyan thunder server class motherboard.  I guess the days of the industry telling you that you need a gazillion watt power supply are over.  The new power supplies are modular and feature a couple of ports that Enermax calls "future ready" ports.  These ports are 12 pin and allows a spot for Enermax to design new cables in case a new requirement comes along.  This way the consumer would only have to buy the new cable and not a whole new power supply.

E-Powertec Our good friends at E-power technology had a nice booth.  As always they displayed quite a few of their power supplies.  Including one that can provide power to USB devices even when the computer is turned off.  This is called the 3 in 1 power supply.  It provides power to the PC, Power to USB devices (even when the computer is off) and SATA power for external SATA hard drives.  The Zumax light next to the power supply is being powered by the power supply and the power supply is turned off.  The power supply is 80% efficient and comes in 550w and 650w sizes.

Saitek      Day 2 ended with a meeting with Saitek in their private suite.  They had their latest and greatest game controllers on display and Mike couldn't resist playing some flight simulator.  The most interesting note here are the two flight control boxes to the left of the keyboard.  These are prototypes and should be available soon.  They are small LCD displays that can display one of several readouts that you would find in the cockpit of an aircraft.  For people, like Mike, that are really into flight sims, this is a great product.  You will also be able to buy several of these boxes and use them together to build your own cockpit with each box displaying a different readout. The Saitek keyboard that was on display was pretty kewl too.  First off, you can see that there are two colors, green and red.  The WASD keys along with the other common gaming keys are red.  However, if you don't like this, you can make the whole keyboard, red or green.  The keyboard also features 12 buttons, 6 on each side, that can be programmed for functions of the game you are playing.  The top of the keyboard is touch controlled.  For instance, slide your finger across the volume meter and the volume increases or decreases.  Simply touch the red design at the top and the background light changes color.

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