View Single Post - Monday, January 07 - CES 2008

Hellfire · Rated XXX

On Monday, we spent very little time on the floor. In fact, we only went to a few booths on Monday that was not a private booth/suite.

The first booth we walked to was CoolerMaster. They where showing off many custom painted cases which looked beautiful. The pictures I took of these did not come out well, so I will attempt to retake some pictures the next couple of days. Maybe BigBruin got some pics for us.

What did come out ok, was a few pics of their Full Tower Cosmos case. This case has multiple fans to help with airflow. There is a bottom 120mm, two top 120mm, and a rear 120mm. The hard drive bays (6 of them) are remoable trays with the connections towards the back panel for cable routing. The top panel has the standard USB 2.0, headphone/microphone, and Firewire. In addition it includes an eSATA port.

Coolermaster also had many of their coolers on display. The V10 caught our attention due to the incredible size of it. This cooler not only cools the CPU, but also helps to cool the RAM, Northbridge and Mosfets. Hope your case can support it, because it is huge, and I imagine fairly heavy.

Crucial was displaying new Ballistic Tracer DDR3, a RED edition, which includes activity LEDs and a red PCB. First it will be released in the UK, then the US will follow several months later. No pricing was available at this time.

Crucial was also showing off their SSD drives. Similar to the other SSDs so I will not get into it. What was interesting though, was their display of them. They had it attached to a device that would violently shake and jolt the SSD while it was in use. This shows that there are no moving parts in SSDs to cause problems if it is used in a high movement type device. Price not available but expect it to be high (just like all the other SSDs).

On the way out, we walked by the Creative booth that had Fatal1ty playing audience members. They would spin a wheel which would give Fatal1ty a handicap. Unfortunatelty the guy that got to play Fatal1ty never played a computer game, and had a bad spin. He got the full on Fatal1ty experience. Nothing held back. In three minutes Fatal1ty killed him many times, and started messing with him, jumping around him while the guy was trying to figure out how to move, look around, and shoot. The guy didn't stand a chance. It was all in fun, and the guy left laughing about the experience.

Monday night we attended the TigerDirect event, which had several vendors showing off some products. MSI had two of their latest motherboard boxes on display as well as a quad Cross-Fire system. Sadly, only two of the Cross-Fire cards were enabled.

After TigerDirect we went over to ShowStoppers. This event we were told was incredible, and had some of the best products on display. It must not have been something we were interested in because most of it was walked by. However that doesn't mean we weren't interested in anything...

There was a booth showing off the Heinnekan mini-keg dispenser (with free samples). So of course we had to try it out and get a drink. Not bad, nice and cold. Very little foam on it. They will be working with other beer manufacturers to get more mini-kegs available, of curse though that takes time.

The other booth at ShowStoppers that I was interested in was a display by Archos. I have been a fan of Archos media players for many years. My first review on BigBruin was of an Archos player I bought. They were dispalying the 705WiFi edition, which has a large 7" (800x480) touchscreen. If you travel, this is the media player to have. It will play things you record from the TV (using the built in DVR function), downloaded content either from your PC, or the Archos Portal in multiple formats.

Archos was also showing off the Archos TV. Similar to the Apple TV device it is a home theater pc in a box. However, in my opinion the Archos TV is much better than the Apple TV.

From the Archos website:
"ARCHOS TV+ combines a WiFi Media Player with a high-capacity DVR for enjoying movies, music, photos, podcasts, Web video, the full Internet and more right on your widescreen TV. With up to 250GB of capacity on a multimedia hard drive, you can record hundreds of hours of video and transfer content via high speed to your ARCHOS Portable Media Players."

We also went to a private suite at the Bellagio for a meeting with OCZ and Hypersonic. What we saw there will be discussed in another topic.