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Computex 2007 Report Part 1 June 07, 2007 |
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Summary: The world's biggest tech trade event is happening now and we cover all the big players. Brandon reports from day one.
 Introduction | Page:: ( 1 / 4 ) |
Normally Computex is a pretty exciting show, last year Intel’s then upcoming Core 2 line of CPUs were all the rage, and the year before that ATI launched their CrossFire technology at Computex, however this year the show has so far been much more mundane – there really hasn’t been any one new product that everyone’s been buzzing about. While we’ve certainly seen some cool new products, that killer app really hasn’t materialized yet. Here are our highlights of the show so far:
ASUS
Building on their high-end Republic of Gamers motherboard line, ASUS demonstrated a slew of new motherboards targeted specifically towards gamers and hardware enthusiasts. Their new Blitz Extreme motherboard features ASUS’ Fusion Block system that mixes liquid cooling with heat pipes for cooling the North and South Bridges of the system chipset as well as the VRM circuitry.
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Based on Intel’s P35 Bearlake chipset, the Blitz Extreme also boasts an interesting feature dubbed Crosslinx which is designed to allow x8 operation for both PCI Express graphics (PEG) slots for ATI CrossFire. If you recall, the P35 chipset natively supports CrossFire, but can’t split the PCIe lanes evenly among the PEG slots, this hampers performance as a result.
If ASUS’ Crosslinx technology works as advertised, it could theoretically get around this limitation and thus run faster than other conventional P35 motherboards when two Radeon cards are combined for CrossFire. Sitting below the Blitz Extreme is the Blitz Formula. Like the Blitz Extreme, it utilizes the P35 chipset, only it supports DDR2 memory instead of DDR3 and it lacks the liquid cooling. Both boards come with a copy of STALKER as well as a copy of 3DMark 06, an external LCD poster display, and ASUS’ Supreme FX II audio card.
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Besides the new ROG motherboards, ASUS also showcased a P35 motherboard with DDR3 memory built-in, the P5K3 Premium. Sitting atop the DDR3-1333 memory was a massive copper heatsink, and as you can see in the images above, the memory is also linked with the heat pipe cooling used to cool the chipset and power circuitry. ASUS is also ready for Intel’s X38 chipset when it debuts in Q3. Their upcoming P5E3 Deluxe motherboard was up and running inside the ASUS booth.
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Also on display at ASUS was their upcoming M3A32-MVP Deluxe. Based on AMD’s upcoming RD790 chipset, the M3A32-MVP Deluxe is the first motherboard we’ve seen which features memory cooling built-in to the motherboard. Flanking these Corsair Dominator memory modules is a copper heatsink/heat pipe combination. It will be interesting to see how effective this solution is when the board ships later this year.
| Intel and Gigabyte | Page:: ( 2 / 4 ) |
Intel
Besides officially launching the 3-series chipset at Computex, Intel also was showcasing their upcoming Penryn family of CPUs. During a press presentation on Wednesday Intel demonstrated their successor to today’s “V8” platform running with two quad-core Penryn CPUs at 3.0GHz. Each CPU ships with 12MB of cache onboard, so 24MB of L2 cache effectively for the entire platform.
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Intel used the demo to showcase the power of Penryn’s new SSE4 instructions. We were shown benches of both DivX as well as Cinebench 10. You can see the Cinbench score in the image above: as you can see the Penryn-based V8 platform turned in a score of over 22,000 in Cinebench 10!
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Gigabyte
Gigabyte had a wide range of AMD and Intel-based motherboards on display at their Computex booth. Arguably the most eye-opening board was Gigabyte’s RD790-based GA-M790-DQ6.
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The GA-M790-DQ6 features a whopping four PCI Express graphics slots. In fact on the show floor Gigabyte had the GA-M790-DQ6 up and running with four Radeon HD 2600 XT cards, although they weren’t running in CrossFire mode. For multi-monitor users, this configuration would allow you to run eight distinct monitors from the system! The board is built with all-solid Japanese capacitors, supports Gigabyte’s SilentPipe heat pipe technology for cooling the chipset and VRM circuitry, and supports AMD RD790 features such as HyperTransport 3, PCIe 2.0, and DDR2-1066.
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Another popular item in the Gigabyte booth is their upcoming X38 motherboard, the GA-X38T-DQ6. The GA-X38T-DQ6 lists support for DDR3-1600, and ships with Intel’s ICH9R South Bridge. If you’re not quite ready to take the plunge and splurge for DDR3 memory, Gigabyte also makes a DDR2 version, the GA-X38-DQ6.
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Gigabyte also had a P35 motherboard with both DDR3 and DDR2 memory slots onboard, the GA-P35C-DS3R. As you can see in the photos, the GA-P35C-DS3R ships with two DDR3 slots and four DDR2 memory slots. From what we’ve been told, due to routing issues these combo DDR3+DDR2 motherboard don’t run quite as fast as P35 motherboards with dedicated slots solely for DDR3 or DDR2, but for those who aren’t as picky about performance and want an upgrade path available for DDR3 once DDR3 modules are more inexpensive, a combo board like the GA-P35C-DS3R would be a good choice. The GA-P35C-DS3R supports DDR3 speeds up to 1333MHz.
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Gigabyte was also showing off their new cases. One case, the 3D Mercury, has a built-in liquid-cooling system. Optional accessories for the 3D Mercury include Gigabyte’s Blue Eye, which provides VGA liquid cooling, and Gigabyte’s new line of power supplies.
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On the VGA side, Gigabyte showed off their new line of SilentPipe 3 cards based on NVIDIA’s GeForce 8500 and 8600 GPUs as well as the Radeon 2600 XT. The cards use heat pipe cooling in order to run silently.
| Page 3 | Page:: ( 3 / 4 ) |
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Sapphire
Without a doubt, the card that drew the most attention in Sapphire’s suite at Computex was the Radeon HD 2900 XT Toxic. First announced a few weeks back, the 2900 XT Toxic is a liquid-cooled Radeon HD 2900 XT board. As you can see, the cards themselves are single-slot, they are then attached to a separate liquid reservoir which sits in two 5.25” drive bays. Keeping everything cool will be a large fan outfitted with blue LEDs that will spin anywhere from 1600-2400 RPMs.
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The cooling system is upgradeable, allowing Toxic owners to add an additional Radeon HD 2900 XT Toxic card for CrossFire, or even a 3rd-party CPU waterblock for cooling your processor.
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For added performance, Sapphire even plans to overclock the Toxic card from the factory. The Toxic card is expected to ship sometime later this month.
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Besides the 2900 XT Toxic, Sapphire also had their second-generation Radeon HD 2900 XT card on display at Computex. If you recall our Radeon HD 2900 XT preview article, we were critical of the amount of noise generated from the 2900 XT’s fan – it’s a very loud card when running under load. Sapphire’s engineers realized this as well and have come up with a cooling solution of their own which still relies on copper heat pipe technology, but has replaced the large copper block and heatsink that ATI use with an aluminum heatsink that they’ve developed on their own.
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According to Sapphire, their redesigned cooler is quite effective at keeping R600 cool, with the added benefit of being lighter. Sapphire also replaces the stock ATI fan with their own custom fan that spins at lower RPMs – around 3-4K RPMs (load) versus the 6K RPMs of the stock ATI unit – allowing the card to generate less noise under load than the stock ATI fan. The one downside of Sapphire’s fan is that it requires an external power connection (we were told if they’d used the fan header on the 2900 XT card it would default to the stock ATI fan speeds) but we think this is a small price that enthusiasts will be more than willing to pay in order to reduce noise.
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Sapphire also had a range of Radeon HD 2600 and 2400 cards on showcase at Computex. Most notable is their dual Radeon HD 2600 XT card which should begin shipping on 6/30. The card combines two Radeon HD 2600 XT GPUs on one board for CrossFire.
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| MSI | Page:: ( 4 / 4 ) |
MSI
Like the other motherboard manufacturers, MSI had a range of X38 and P35 motherboards on display at Computex, as well as RD790 motherboards.
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The most prominent system on display was their X38 Diamond running with a Core 2 Extreme QX6850 overclocked to 4.2GHz. The system was cooled with a Coolaler liquid cooling unit while graphics duties were handled by NVIDIA’s GeForce 8800 Ultra.
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Besides the X38 Diamond, MSI also had their P35 Platinum motherboard on static display. As you can see, the P35 Platinum has a very ornate heat pipe cooler on the North Bridge of the chipset, MSI refers to this as their CircuPipe technology. CircuPipe is actually used on a range of Bearlake motherboards, including the P35 Diamond and G33 Platinum.
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Another MSI motherboard that caught our eye was the K9A2 Platinum. Utilizing AMD’s 790 chipset, the board is ready for AMD’s Phenom CPUs, and is based on AMD’s AM2+ socket.
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MSI has also made a name for themselves in the notebook market. Many OEMs, including gaming PC manufacturer VoodooPC have used MSI notebook designs in the past. Now MSI is targeting the gaming market directly with a new line of notebooks.
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One notebook that really caught our eye was the GX600. MSI’s GX600 supports the latest Core 2 CPUs from Intel, while graphics duties are handled by the GeForce 8600M GT 512MB. It has a 15.4” 8-ms display and supports both VGA and HDMI outputs. One feature that sets the GX600 apart from some of the other gaming notebooks on the market is its “Turbo” performance button. When the Turbo button is pressed, the GX600 automatically overclocks the CPU by 20%.
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MSI also makes a larger variant of the GX600 (although it lacks the Turbo setting) that sports a 17” LCD display and is available with both Radeon 2600 and GeForce 8600 GT graphics.
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On the 3D side, MSI demonstrated their RX2600 Geminium. The RX2600 Geminium combines two Radeon 2600 cards running in CrossFire and features heat pipe cooling.
Conclusion
We’ll have more coverage from Computex 2007 including video footage of several of the aforementioned products. Stay tuned!