First up I guess an explanation of the title of this article is in order. The Sydney PC Show is, of course, "IT Expo incorporating COMDEX", "Networld + Interop" and "Linux Business Expo" all rolled into one, at the Darling Harbour exhibition centre in Sydney, Australia. It's all organised by www.ITExpo.com.au, one ticket gets you access to all 3 events and you can pass freely between them - but there doesn't seem to be any all-encompassing name for the entire extravaganza. However, if you said to pretty much anyone "Going to the PC Show?" they'd know what you meant - hence the title.
I was surprised by the amount of negative feedback I got from friends who had been to the show. Complaints that there was nothing to see or nothing new abounded. This to me seems a little silly - I mean, what genuinely new and exciting things have happened this year or last? Intel's P4 processor and NVIDIA's GeForce3 video chipset - both of which were represented at the show - were announced, but both are evolutionary steps rather than revolutionary. I've been to a few of these shows now and I approach them with the attitude that it'll be pretty much identical to last year, but a bit faster. Having said that, there were a few cool things that caught my eye - again, nothing amazing, but some cool stuff - and that's what I'll cover in this article. If you want P4 or GF3 benchmarks there's a zillion on the web already..
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Right. The first thing that grabbed my eye was this feather-light aluminium case from Sky Hawks. Note the front-mounted connectors and rear-exhaust fan over the CPU area. The other mid-mounted fan slides along an aluminium track so you can lock it in position anywhere along the height of the case. Focus airflow on your PCI cards, your AGP card or your CPU.. neato.
At left below is a different style of aluminium case from Sky Hawks - at right is of course the Lian-Li range brought into Australia by Elsa and available from AusPCMarket - this includes the PC-10 Midtower we reviewed a little while ago here. I didn't realise there were so many colour options..
One thing that had definitely increased since last year was the amount of cooling products for sale. I saw 3 small stalls which seemed to be selling only ThermalTake and JustCooler products and there were many vendors who had a "cooling stuff" section of their stand. I'll spare you the photos of SuperOrbs and the like, but it's good to see more of that kind of thing happening. I didn't see any peltiers but Elsa had a new water-cooling kit on display:
complete with radiator..
This system is interesting because it's clearly designed to be contained entirely within a case. The radiator fan is powered by a 3-pin intelligent connector and the combined reservoir-pump is 12V, powered by a molex (hdd) connector. It comes with an apparently excellent manual, lots of different mounting clips and what look like motherboard/video chipset coolers too. The tubing looks thin, but it's thicker than the senfu kit we reviewed here some time ago. This has literally only been in the country for a few days and they're not sure how it will perform - from the sounds of things it'll be reviewed on OCAU soon.
I stopped for a quick drool at this machine - one of the Elsa guys' personal machines and one of the most tricked out at the show. Go the blue orb on the southbridge. :) I also quite like their removable HDD bays with the car-grille fronts on them:
Speaking of which, there were a few pre-modded cases with windows and neons around, all seemed to have been provided by Peripherals Plus. A couple on the Oxygen stand and one at the AMD stand..
The Intel and AMD stands were both massive - you could pretty much navigate around one of the halls by judging your distance from the AMD stand by the volume of the 3DMark2001 music which seemed to be constantly looping on several machines there.