Girl: "It's so tiny!" *giggles*

Check out that image above (Don’t laugh!).  That is a Zacate APU, featuring 2x Bobcat cores and the equivalent of a Radeon HD5450 DX11 graphics processing unit, with a TDP of 19 watts, all in a package no larger than your thumbprint!  Now, to call such a chip ‘impressive’ simply doesn’t give AMD enough credit.  Scale down the clock speeds on both the Bobcat cores and the GPU and you have yourself an Ontario with a TDP of just 9 watts!  Also important to mention is that the GPU in Zacate/Ontario is not all HD5XXX generation, but in fact contains the video processing engine from the HD6XXX series of cards.

So what products will these chips be fitting into you ask?  Primarily netbooks and low-end ultra-portable notebooks.  On the netbook side, users will be gaining substantially in the CPU/GPU performance department, while hopefully maintaining, if not improving on existing battery life numbers.  With that however, users should expect prices to be between $50/$100 higher than current ATOM-based netbooks of similar size/spec.  On the notebook side, you’ll likely take a hit in CPU power when compared to ULV Core 2’s, and especially Core i3’s/Sandy Bridge.  However graphically, Zacate will offer an improvement over current ION/Optimus graphics solutions and should maintain excellent battery life.

What about tablets, slates, or even smart phones?  Are they in the cards?  Yes, for 2012.  AMD says that in order to accommodate the tablet market, ideally they’d like to get these chips under the 3-5w mark, depending on application.  For that, they expect to be able to tune the silicon as it is and have a solution by the end of the year that should be ideal for these markets.  And smart phones?  Well, again, John tells me that AMD has a plan for this and Zacate/Ontario is ideally the first step toward having a solution for those products.  Will there be a Zacate/Ontario based smartphone this year?  Absolutely not, with their be a derivation at some point in 2012?  Probably not, but 13 may be the lucky number for AMD in our opinion.

In the gallery above you can see the current road map for AMD’s APU line up.  You will notice that in 2012, Krishna and Wichita bring along several improvements.  The most noticeable being a die-shrink from 40nm all the way down to 28nm, as well as adding 2 more Bobcat cores, for a total of up to 4 cores per APU!  The Bobcat cores will also be further “enhanced”, most likely adding in further TDP improvements per core.

Overall, we are looking at a very impressive, very interesting year for AMD in the ultra-portable mobile sector.

Zalman’s entry into the SSD market seems interesting as it is already a completely saturated marketplace, I guess we will see how that goes in 2011. Their new line of cases looked great and the GS1200 has lots of hot-swap bays, which is a great thing to have in cases today. The CPU power consumption meter looked like a nice device to give you up to date voltage readings. Zalman looks strong going into the 2011 year with their chassis lines refreshed, as well as a dive into the SSD world, but as always we will have to wait and see.

Special Edition Water Cooled Case:

This massive beast was all alone in their special room. It has four radiators inside, which help water cool three video cards and the CPU. They used white NZXT wire sleeving on the PSU wires, which looks nice and you are not able see through it. I was impressed by the sleeving and think it ranks just below the masters of sleeving, MDPC. They did not give us a name on this machine, but only told us it was not available to the masses, special order only. If you are brave enough to send in a price request, this case could be something amazing for you to have to show off to all of your friends and make them jealous!

The iBuyPower suite was a lot of fun to hang out in. To see them take popular cases in the market place and put their own unique spin on them was refreshing. They did had some very interesting designs and setups for the cases, which I took note of for my next water cooling setup. They seem to be on the leading edge of innovative designs for pre-made computers. Keep an eye out for them in 2011, as I have a feeling they will be doing big things in the pre-built world.

Moving on to video cards, we have a new HD6870 Hawk Edition, HD6950 Twin Frozr II, HD6970 Lightning Edition and GTX580 Lightning Edition.  Each of these cards features slightly improved versions of their coolers from the previous generation of cards, primarily having to do with the fan shrouds.  MSI decided that there was too much plastic on the fan shrouds and had them changed to use more aluminum for a firmer construction and cleaner look.

Next up we’ll take a look at MSI’s new flagship for the P67 chipset, the Big Bang Marshall.

MSI P67 Big Bang Marshall

Big Bang Marshall

Here she is, in all her glory.  MSI has gone with SFC-chokes and Hi-C caps for the P67 lineup, especially on the Marshall.  You can see how clean the socket is with the new, upgraded chokes and caps, and it’s really a visual upgrade that is also extremely functional.  The board features no less than 8 PCI-E x16 slots and utilizes a new chip from Lucid Hydra as a bridge for additional PCI-E lanes (P67 only supports 8x times 2 by default).  With up to four slots populated, users can expect full x16 support, while with all eight slots populated, each lane will default to 8x.  Slots/PCI-E lanes can also be disabled with the flip of a switch.  This feature can be useful for extreme overclocking situations.

Triple BIOS + OCGenie 2

Triple BIOS feature is also implemented with the Marshall.  With this, the user can essentially use one BIOS entirely for their tweaking and overclocking settings, while still maintaining two totally stable BIOS’ as a fail safe to prevent the user from having to clear CMOS after a failed overclocked.  This is also useful in the case of a bad BIOS flash.

OCGenie II is also included from a hardware level, allowing both beginners and advanced users easier methods of tweaking their boards to get the most out of them.  MSI is very proud of OCGenie II, and we’ll be sure to check it out in detail once we have this board in our hands for review.

The Marshall should be available by next month, or even potentially end of January for a price roughly in the $300 range.  If we could guess, we’d guess more like $350, but maybe MSI will surprise us.  Look for a review on this board from us in the future.

Next up, new AMD board?  But for what?

MSI Big Bang Conquerer

MSI has one more very interesting board on display, this time for the AMD platform.  No details were available on the board, so what I have here is entirely on my own assumptions.  The socket is AM3+, there are 6x SATA 6GBps ports, 10 Phase DrMOS PWM, OCGenie II, and what’s under those heatsinks…well…we’ll have to leave that to your imagination.

Big Bang Conquerer

Black Socket...Cool

The board is already a revision v2.0, which tells me there was some significant update to it since it’s first incarnation, but specifics I do not know, nor can I really speculate.  None the less, if this is a glimpse into the future, the future is certainly a bright one.

Thanks for reading, stay tuned for much more from CES 2011.

Thermaltake Level 10GT

The Level 10GT was the main attraction in the Thermaltake suite. Thermaltake has revamped the case by reducing the weight from the original Level 10 by about 50%. They also opened up the case as well and got rid of the old compartmentalization from the original Level 10. The level 10GT has five hot-swap bays and a side panel door that pops off the hinges, which makes getting in the case extremely quick and easy.

With the Level 10GT coming soon to the marketplace there should be a positive buzz surrounding it. The mechanical gaming keyboard  and the gaming mouse were also a treat to play with.  The mouse software looked great, giving you the ability to change mouse LED colors, adjust sensitivity, and few standard options. It was good to see the Armor A30 micro-ATX case in person to see exactly what they have done with the case. Thermaltake also had a nice set of gaming headphones on display in three different colors. Neither one of us had a chance to test out the sound quality on them though, so for now we are just going off looks. They have also released their new line of PSU’s to the marketplace, the Toughpower XT Gold series. We were also informed that they were in the process of working on Energy Star diamond rated efficiency power supplies.

Silverstone RV03

Yes, the RV03 sure does have gold lines accentuating the front and top of the case. Gold seems to be making a slow comeback these days and now it has made its way onto a chassis. The RV03 keeps what has made the previous generations great and and added flare with the golden stripes. The two massive 180mm Air Penetrator fans on the bottom of the case to help remove excess heat effectively. The RV03 looks to still have great wire management options, but I would need to test it in person to actually see if that holds true.

Silverstone TJ11

As you can see, the TJ11 is HUGE! It has nine 5.25″ exposed drive bays, with the hard drive installed in the bottom by default. You can take the hard drive bays out and install them in the 5.25″ drive bays if you want more room for water cooling. In the bottom it can hold a PSU and two 4×120mm radiators, which will make the TJ11 one of the best water cooling cases on the market. It also has the 180mm Air Penetrator fans helping to remove the unwanted heat. Silverstone did not want to completely modify this case themselves, but would rather have the user modify it and make it completely unique.

The Silverstone suite was impressive with three cases catching our eye. The release date of the TJ11 was supposedly by the end of this month, January, and RV03 around February. It is looking like a big year for SIlverstone with these three cases helping lead the way in the chassis market.

]]> http://www.techreaction.net/2011/01/08/silverstone-ces-tj11-is-here/feed/ 5 http://www.techreaction.net/2011/01/04/techreaction-at-ces-2011/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=techreaction-at-ces-2011 http://www.techreaction.net/2011/01/04/techreaction-at-ces-2011/#comments Wed, 05 Jan 2011 04:42:10 +0000 EnJoY http://www.techreaction.net/?p=14795 TechREACTION will be attending CES again this year, bringing you up to the minute coverage of the latest computer hardware and gadgets! Drew, myself and Jake will all be attending and we think this will be one of the better shows in recent years. We will be publishing stories every hour, and you can expect exclusives! Stay tuned to TechREACTION starting tomorrow evening with our Coverage from the Corsair and Gigabyte events.

As the overclockers prepare to battle they will prep the UD7 motherboards with insulation and vaseline.  This prevents condensation from causing stability issue or hardware death.  When running in a competition at temperatures well below negative 100°C condensation is often an issue.   While condensation can normally be controlled at a live event they need to complete the benchmarks with the allotted time period.

]]> http://www.techreaction.net/2010/08/07/2010-gigabyte-gooc-live-coverage-opening-ceremony/feed/ 2 http://www.techreaction.net/2010/08/06/blog-palit-gtx460-launching-in-the-philippines/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=blog-palit-gtx460-launching-in-the-philippines http://www.techreaction.net/2010/08/06/blog-palit-gtx460-launching-in-the-philippines/#comments Fri, 06 Aug 2010 13:53:45 +0000 bartman1973 http://www.techreaction.net/?p=9103 Palit Microsystems, one of the more popular Graphics Cards manufacturer, launched their latest GTX460 in the Philippines last July 27 with the help of PCtrends, the official local distributor, Nvidia Singapore and Tipid PC, an established PC website in the Philippines. It was held at the Oasis Pavilion, New Manila Quezon City, to which around 250 PC enthusiasts got an exclusive invitation from the owner of TipidPC.

Early birds were greeted by a photo opportunity with girls from Nvidia. Some enjoyed playing COD while waiting for the actual event.

The Nvidia Regional Manager representative gave the audience an overview of what the GTX460 is all about and what the consumer can expect from the latest card from the “Fermi” family.

Then the Palit representative gave the audience the latest video card lineup. The consumer can select from the three available types of card. The Palit GTX460 768MB, clocked at 675Mhz; the Palit GTX460 Sonic 1024MB, clocked at 700 Mhz;  and the Palit GTX460 Sonic Platinum, clocked at 900 Mhz.

Part of the event was a benchmark demo from Philippine OC enthusiasts.  I was invited to carry out 3DMark Vantage benchmarks on two of the 3 card types: Palit GTX 460 and GTX 460 Sonic. I chose to do the benchmarks with the help of my TPC buddies Gil Gerald Navarro (gzhil) and Michelle Patelo (djsub).  Here’s the result of the Palit GTX460 Sonic in stock setting- 700Mhz core clock, 1400 shaider clock and 1800 Memory clock.

The first 3dM Vantage will be on stock settings while later in the event, 3dM vantage will  be used for overclocked GTX460.

A raffle was held to give away 3 pieces of GTX460 to 3 lucky guests! It was done on the 250 guest list using a random number generator. Several minor prizes were also given away includes solar chargers and Palit bags.

While everyone was enjoying dinner buffet, benchmarks were done. I brought the following to setup with the Patil cards: Intel Core  17-980X processor extreme edition, MSI Xpower motherboard, G-skill Perfect Storm 2133 Mhz Cl9 3 x 2GB. The processor will be cooled by Promilatechs Megashadow.  This setup will be on the GTX460 sonic edition.

Another MSI XPower motherboard was brought by gzhil and will be running on extreme cooling. My Koolance V2 will be used for dry ice cooling of the processor. This is to show the audience how extreme cooling is done and at the same time carrying out benchmarks on the Palit’s plain GTX 460 card.

During the benchmarking and overclocking session, the latest graphics card driver from Nvidia was used (258.56) since the WHQL certified drivers from Futuremark cannot detect the GTX460. MSI’s afterburner which was a pretty cool utility was also used to adjust the frequency and voltage of the board.
The result
The GTX 460 sonic which comes with the factory clock of 700Mhz was able to do 900Mhz  which is a 28.5% gain.  The first score was a full 3dM Vantage test which includes the CPU and GPU test. Because of limited time, the 2nd test was just the GPU test. It was able to finished all the GPU focused test at 900Mhz without any problem.

The Plain vanilla GTX460 was able to do 800Mhz vs the 675Mhz core clock. This is approximately equal to 18.5% gain on its stock clock.

These results are impressive! As of writing, this is the first documented OC to achieve  900 Mhz (from the net) on the Sonic card on air and on a limited time!

To close the huge successful event, the audience was treated to a dance number from Girlz Ink which I and the crowd really enjoyed!

The winner will be selected at random and the giveaway will run until Friday, April 30th. To win, all you have to do is follow these simple steps:

Step 1: Go to Twitter.com, and if you don’t have an account yet, make one. If you do, step one is already done for you!

Step 2: Go to the TechREACTION Twitter page and the Thermalright Twitter page and follow both of us.

Step 3: Once you are following both TR and Thermalright we’d like you to make a tweet that says “I stay cool with @thermalright and @TechREACTION”.

FINAL STEP: Post a link to your tweet in this thread. The winner will only be selected from THIS THREAD and will be verified of course, so no cheating!

There will be two prizes, with two chances to win.  The prizes will be two Thermalright Ultra 120 Extreme (rev. C) CPU Coolers, courtesy of Thermalright.

]]> http://www.techreaction.net/2010/04/15/the-techreaction-net-thermalright-twitter-giveaway/feed/ 2