Various Distributors, Cooler Master
Digicor were there, with a display of Tyan and SuperMicro motherboards. There wasn't much info and nobody seemed to be around, but here's a few pics of some high-end Opteron and Xeon boards:
Morning Star distribute HIS, AOpen, AOC and MSI. They had an SFF mini-PC from AOpen which is apparently the first Centrino-based one. Obviously with the Pentium-M mobile CPU this SFF runs cooler and quieter than one with a conventional desktop CPU. They also had a range of HIS video cards on display, including the new X850XT iTurbo, which refers to the enormous cooler mounted on it. They claim this makes the card almost silent and still cooler than most other solutions.
Australia IT are another distributor, with big displays for OCZ, PowerColor, Sparkle and Cooler Master. They had the OCZ Ultra High Performance unbinned memory which is attracting a lot of interest lately (centre in pic below) and the "DFI NF4 Edition" PC5000 (at left in pic). They also had some very snazzy external HDD enclosures from Vantec.
I was quite surprised that Grisoft had a presence at the show. They of course make the AVG Antivirus program that I know a lot of OCAU readers use, largely because it does the job well, but also because it's free for personal use.
DVICO, makers of TV tuners etc, one of which we reviewed here, had their TViX on display. It's a "digital jukebox" for playing audio/video files on your TV or home theatre. Interestingly it contains a 3.5" HDD so you can load it up then take your media with you. More info here.
BCNTech had a focus on mini-PC's, with various tiny motherboards on display. I haven't seen one this small before, being the EPIA-N from VIA. Too small for normal PC memory, it uses SODIMM's, normally used for laptop memory. You can see the size of the PATA IDE connector, to give you a sense of scale.
CoolerMaster had a stand highlighting their various cooling products. The case is their Centurion 530 fulltower, fitted with the AquaGate watercooling system we've reviewed previously here. This obviously isn't a new product, but they've released a range of accessories for it, including GPU coolers and an interesting-looking HDD cooler at right below.
More interesting is their new AquaGate Mini, a more compact system that is installed fully inside the PC. We'll have a review of this product on OCAU soon.
Targus, who I more readily associate with laptop bags than electronic accessories, had an interesting universal PDA keyboard. It's a similar concept to the Palm Portable Keyboard I reviewed a few years ago, but uses an adjustable IRDA emitter and some little grabby arms to connect to virtually any PDA. Beats typing on the little built-in keyboards or onscreen.
AMI Technologies had a fairly large stand, displaying the Albatron and Geil products they distribute. Of particular interest is the Geil UltraX memory, which seems to have a built-in thermometer, in the form of a heat-sensitive panel, similar to stick-on fishtank thermometers or those black heat-sensitive panels that change colour in your hand. This is a pretty low-tech approach but quite an ingenious way to report the memory temperature.
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