Florian Charpentier

Whereas AMD officially launched its 780G chipset and Hybrid Power on Monday, the SLI Power from NVIDIA is still officially under NDA. However, we saw a demonstration at ASRock based on an nForce 780 motherboard (K10N78FullHD-hSLI) which ran a Phenom 9500, 2 GB of DDR2 800 MHz and a GeForce 8400 GS 256 MB.

Well known among overlockers, DFI showed its latest board built on a X48, nForce 790i (C73 + MCP55) and AMD 780 (RS780D +SB700). Here are well designed boards with two PCI 16x slots (except for the ADM card), digital power supply stage at 8 phase (which makes sure there isn't any voltage drop when the processor's in peak), capacitors using solid electrolyte and a Thermalright cooling system. In other words, we have the best components for overclocking.

Cooling passively a component that generates between 20 and 100 W is a real challenge, but users' enthusiasm for silent PC is still strong. They Scythe decided to go one step further and display its Giant Ninja, the biggest prototype of heat sink for processor we have ever seen. We'll let you be the judge.

If the answer if yes, you can choose a model from Tacens, whether it is a classic tower or a PC Home Theater! Here are cases that confirms one of this show's trend, which is a complete lack of moderation. It's hard to be more immoderate than that, but the air flow - noise ratio should be interesting. One just has to get by the design.

Every year, manufacturer of memory modules fight for the fastest module crown. Corsair wins, once again, this year's title by reaching 2 133 MHz or only 33 MHz more than OCZ, but at aggressive timings: 8-8-8-24. The equivalent in DDR1 would hypothetically be a module running at 533 MHz CAS 2, which may be more meaningful. Running on an NVIDIA reference motherboard built on a 790i chipset, this accomplishment requires a voltage of 2.1 V. The machine crashed when we came on the booth and had to reboot before we could launch CPU-Z and verify the value.

There really isn't anything new when it comes to laptops at this year's CES. The relatively important gap between this show and the next Centrino launch (Montevina, in June) is to blame. This is however the occasion for MSI to show us its prototypes create some buzz rather than display something that's meant to be sold (let's remember the laptops that had solar panels two years ago).

HIS ha a couple of interesting thing to show. It first claim to own the fastest Radeon HD 3870 as the manufacturer will launch it in the second quarter a model equipped with a water block (meaning it can only work when coupled with a watercooling system), which allows for an intense overclocking : 850 MHz for the GPU and 2380 MHz for the GDDR3 for this IceQ Liquid.

Here's another prototype that could have been quite interesting. It's at least very original and comes from MSI. The ECOlution (the developed by the Taiwanese Polo-Tech) is a passive fan for northbridge. What we mean by passive fan is that this cooling system doesn't need a fan when the chip is idle. However, when in peak, the heat generated by the chipset is used to dilate a gas that will move a piston that in turn will move the blades of the fan that's placed in front of the heat sink's extension linked with 2 heat pipes.

The manufacturer of high end memory modules continues its diversification process, taking advantage of its reputation as a manufacturer of elitist products made for gamers. We have no news from its compressor, but more interesting for a majority of people, OCZ jumps in the laptop market.

Faithful to its calling, the company reminded us its goal was still to provide solutions that gave something more to consumers than the basic existing products. Practically, Matrox didn't have anything new destined to the mass market, the Millennium P690 being launched recently. The manufacturer was showing two new solutions meant for prosumers, which testifies of the increasing importance of this market.

There was an avalanche of products Thermaltake was showing for the first time. There was, for instance, the trimmed down version of two existing and massive cases. The Xaser XIMX and the Armor+ MX. Nothing much to know except that they do remain quite big (still bigger than the majority of cases). One detail worth mentioning is the 23 cm fan of the Armor+ MX on the left panel.

MSI demonstrated an EFI motherboard on its CeBIT booth. EFI is the next generation of BIOS that has never seen the light of day in our PC even as we've waited for it for so long. It was only a demonstration and MSI clearly stated that it wasn't planning on selling the board any time soon.

One striking trend of this year's CeBIT is the number of motherboards that own integrated graphics.

Gigabyte has a good example of the unbearable marketing trend that wants to take the smallest thing and turn it into a marketing argument. Even though the manufacturer built most of its reputation on graphic cards using passive and silent cooling systems, it now boasts a "3D active fan" as a major feature on of its graphic cards.

The CeBIT 2008 edition doesn't have much to offer when it comes to new graphic cards. The 9800 GX2 is delayed to March 18 and since there isn't anything new from AMD, we weren't expecting much. Some of the AMD or NVIDIA partners have however taken advantage of this timeout to let the imagination of their engineers or marketing departments run wild.

We had been impressed with Coolermaster and the exhaustivity of new products shown the previous years. However, this year, we were a left hanging even if we were able to see some more beautiful things.

Abit at CeBIT still kicking.

Although the launch of the GeForce 9800 GX2 was postponed to March 18, it didn't stop it from making a timid appearance on some of the most daring booths. The official order has been not to show the card.