Case and Cooling

There was a new emphasis on case and cooling during the show, although not in the traditional means. Anand mentioned MGE's desire for a high end small form factor HTPC case and our talks with Zalman, ASUS, CoolerMaster and ThermalTake also conveyed the same vision. All manufacturers seemed to indicate that Cebit 2005 will be the show that they launch their big products (particularly Zalman), but in the meantime, we had some tidbits from ThermalTake and CoolerMaster to share.

ThermalTake

Although there were not any finished products on the show floor, we got word from ThermalTake that they will be unveiling their case designed for water cooling within the next few weeks. Mount holes, reservoir and piping are all designed into the case itself, which looked very similar to a next generation Xaser design. We will get more details, and of course, a full blown review in the next couple of weeks.

ASUS

ASUS announced to us that they had spent the better part of a year working on their own next generation case based on nothing that we had ever seen before - the Vento. The case in the suite was just a prototype, but we did get a few pictures snapped in the meantime.

The front bezel has a hydraulic-like lift that brings the cover over the top. Unfortunately, lifts were not entirely perfected in time for the show. From the side view, you can also see Vento's extremely large cooling solution, which reminds us slightly of some cooler products that CoolerMaster worked on a year or so ago. We look forward to more progress on this one in the upcoming weeks.

Index Cases (continued)
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  • jiulemoigt - Tuesday, January 18, 2005 - link

    I've used one of the light scibe drives, wheres the fact it burns in monocrome, which looks color but is not color, they look like the windows hologrph cds. The other thing is you can burn the CDs when ever as your burning the other side and use a normal burner for the normal side.
  • nullpointerus - Tuesday, January 18, 2005 - link

    What's with the vaccum cleaner on page 2?
  • skunkbuster - Sunday, January 16, 2005 - link

    that Vento was damn fugly!
  • Determinant - Saturday, January 15, 2005 - link

    #10, you misunderstood me. I also want to see what downfalls a product has. I too believe in non-biased articles and Anandtech is one of the best sites for that.

    #9 & #10, If you are people that go to these events then you are justified to say that about events (I agree with both of you when talking about products) but most of us don't attend these events.

    So if you want a quick way of deciding wether to read the article or not then saying "nothing interesting happened" would really help you out. My comment was directed at authors rather than readers because an author wants everyone to read the article.

    I still stand by what I said earlier.
  • overclockingoodness - Saturday, January 15, 2005 - link

    I agree with #9. We don't need to see the positive side of a trade show or a product. We can just looking at the specifications and read the press release if we only want to see positives of everything. I want to see what kind of downfalls does the product has. I don't want independant review organizations to show me the positives: what will be the difference between in-house marketing departments and publications?

    AnandTech and all other publications are doing right by showing the wrong sides of the product or a trade show for that matter.
  • stephenbrooks - Saturday, January 15, 2005 - link

    #7 actually I disagree, it's nice to see reviews that don't sugar-coat everything and if a show is really "some interesting widgets but nothing too revolutionary", says so!
  • semo - Saturday, January 15, 2005 - link

    #6, i don't know the exact speed but 16x dvd buring is 22,000kb/s or 22mb/s not 22kb/s. at 22kb/s a 4.7gb disc will burn in about 55 hours lol.

    anyway, i'm glad anandtech has finally reported on lightscribe. too bad mr. Kubicki didn't seem to like the idea too much. i, on the other hand, have been waiting for a whole year. i really really need a dvd burner now!
  • Determinant - Friday, January 14, 2005 - link

    Just a suggestion:

    Instead of saying something like:

    "CES doesn't give us any really juicy details in small dosages"

    (this next quote is from the previous article)
    "With the death of Comdex in 2004, the computer press had every expectation that CES would fill the void. That expectation turned out to be overly optimistic "

    It would be better to just talk about what CES does instead of mentioning what it doesn't. Instead of talking about disadvantages or pitfalls, articles should focus on the positive aspects.

    The reason for this is because whenever a reader reads an article that is "downbeat" then it makes you feel like just skipping to the conclusion since the article won't have anything interesting anyway (the author basically says so).

    I'm not trying to criticize this article it's just that I've been seeing this quite a bit lately at many websites. The readers can't be excited about something that sounds "downbeat" and will be less inclined to continue reading.

    I can only hope that authors will keep this in mind in the future.
  • mbhame - Friday, January 14, 2005 - link

    In http://www.anandtech.com/tradeshows/showdoc.aspx?i... you said
    "Keep in mind that the physical limitation on hard drive read speed is what keeps DVD burners from writing faster than 16X"
    But I have read multiple times previously that an optical drive's RPM becomes dangerously-fast >52X CD/16X DVD speeds - plus 16X DVD's transfer rate is 22KBps. StorageReview.com also points out that even ancient HDDs like the Seagate U6 has an initial transfer rate of 29.9MBps.

    I think you ought to modify your article sir. Thank you.
  • jamawass - Friday, January 14, 2005 - link

    Hope DLP wins and the 1080p move into front projector lines. I love my early gen Infocus X1 projector, can't imagine how a 1080p dlp will look.

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