Computex 2010 Show Coverage - Part 4
Memory modules, chassis, power supply units and more highlights from Computex 2010 await you in our ongoing show coverage. This time, we check out AcBel, Antec, Apacer, Apogee, Geil, Kingmax, Patriot, PQI, QNAP, Synology, Team Group and Xigmatek.
AcBel's Booth
AcBel had its whole range of power supply units and adapters at its booth, most of which were 80 PLUS certified.
AcBel's R9 Power series come in a number of wattage models but all have received 80 PLUS Gold award. It's not exactly a new series but it remains one of AcBel's top products.
With its 80 PLUS Gold, which means at least 90% efficiency, AcBel has even labeled it as 90 PLUS on the R9. Shown here is the 1100W model, providing more than enough power for most users.
One of AcBel's newer power supply series is the M88 Power, which has modular cable management. It is however 80 PLUS Silver, though it supports multi-GPU configurations from ATI and NVIDIA.
Unlike the other series from AcBel, there are no LED lights for the PSU fan on the M85H, which features a single 230V active PFC and is 80 PLUS Bronze ready.
Antec's Booth
Antec showed off its wide range of chassis and power supply units.
The new Antec LanBoy Air PC chassis deserves its name, what with the wholly mesh design. It comes with a front panel USB 3.0 port and supports three sizes of motherboards, miniITX, microATX and standard ATX. It's also a winner of Computex 2010's award.
Here's another view of the LanBoy Air, this time in a black and blue color scheme. You can install up to a maximum of 15 fans on this chassis, including top 120mm fans, 120mm HDD fans, and TriCool LED fans for the graphics. One of the unique thing about this chassis is that you can remove the meshed panels of the sides in a modular fashion, both for easy access and installation of components.
The HDDs are suspended by these rubber mounts to reduce noise from vibrations.
This is another new series of chassis from Antec, the Darkfield series. This is the DF-85, which comes with a hot swap HDD bay at the top, compatible with 2.5-inch SSD and the front fan doors can be opened and the filters easily removed for cleaning.
Here's the hot swap bay for the 2.5-inch SSD at the top of the chassis.
The spacious interior of the DF-85. We noticed that you can change the CPU cooler without needing to unscrew the motherboard while there are two 120mm TriCool fans at the rear for cooling.
For those who don't require a full tower, the DF-30 has a similar set of features but is more modestly sized.
The OC edition of Antec's 1200W TruePower Quattro PSU comes with adjustable voltage and fan controls.
Antec's new High Current Pro (HCP) series of PSUs are 80 PLUS Gold certified, and uses Japanese brand capacitors and even the PWM fan, This model is rated at 1200W but there are more performance enthusiast wattages like 850W in the lineup.
Apacer's Booth
Apacer deals mainly in flash storage and memory modules and these were the products we saw at its booth.
For the overclockers, Apacer's Giant II series are rated at up to DDR3-2200 and are available as a 4GB kit (CL 10-10-10-30). Note the taller than usual heatspreader,
For the ultimate memory module from Apacer, this is its Heat pipe series, which has a separate heatsink connected to the memory module via a heat pipe. It's rated at a higher DDR3-2500.
External USB 3.0 HDDs from Apacer, like the AC430, which also comes with anti-shock protection.
Apacer's Turbo II series of SSD, the AS602 and AS603 is a MLC type drive with capacity of up to 100GB. It uses the new SandForce controller with up to 280/260MB in write speed performance.
Apogee's Booth
Apogee is the brand for Walton Chaintech and the company does a number of components, from memory modules to flash storage and even graphics cards.
Part of its Astro Drive series, the A102 drive here is USB 3.0 compliant with capacity of either 8 or 16GB.
This USB 3.0 flash drive (A101) has capacities of 32, 64 and 128GB with transfer speeds of up to 186MB/s (read) and 130MB/s (write).
This 4GB kit, the Apogee GT is targeted at overclockers with its rather heavy duty looking memory heatsink, It runs at DDR3-2400.
This Apogee DDR3 OC series is also rated at up to DDR3 2400 but the heatspreader is at least not as extreme. It's available in both 2GB and 4GB kits.
We also saw this AP201 mobile phone designed for seniors, with an extra large keypad, an emergency speed-dial button and large display fonts.
Meanwhile, this tiny cute phone is designed for children, also with an emergency speed dial. It has a feature for parents to monitor their kids' surroundings and even parental locks for calls and text messages.
Geil's Booth
It's more memory modules at Geil, especially for the enthusiast. The company however has another brand that's doing power supply units.
Geil's EVO TWO 4GB kit is rated at DDR3 2500 and CL9 to provide the best overclocking performance. It has a rather tall heatspreader.
This is Geil's Value Plus series, which is focused on providing performance and stability with the best value. The design of the heatspreader is pretty standard and the DDR3 speed goes up to 1600MHz, with dual, triple and even hexa channel kits offered.
For the DIY enthusiast, Geil has its Ultra Plus series, with speeds of up to DDR3 2400 CL9. The heatspreader looks similar to the value series but obviously the quality of the memory module is different.
Thortech is Geil's spinoff brand for power supply units. They are as usual focused on the enthusiast market for these PSUs and as a result, all of the offered models will be 80 PLUS Gold.
As you can expect from an enthusiast oriented brand, the wattage is excessive at 1200W for the top model in Thortech's lineup. It also has a single +12V capable of providing 100A.
Additionally, the PSU is connected to a front panel display called the iPower meter that displays relevant info like fan speed, temperature, and wattage. One can even control the fan speed from this panel.
A modular cable system is preferred on these Thortech PSU.
Besides the powerful 1200W model, Thortech also has more down-to-earth models like this 850W Thunderbolt. This model comes with quad +12V rails providing up to 70A.
Kingmax's Booth
Like so many other vendors we have seen in the lower floor of Nangang hall, Kingmax is all about memory and flash storage.
A USB 3.0 flash drive from Kingmax with higher transfer rate than the past (up to 4.8Gbps) and available in capacities of 16, 32 and 64GB.
External USB 3.0 hard drives from Kingmax, ranging in sizes from 320 to 500 to 640GB.
Kingmax's enthusiast memory series, Hercules is rated at up to DDR3-2400. It's available in 4GB kits with a CAS latency of 10.
A range of iPhone chargers and battery cases from Kingmax was on display.
Kingmax also has this Nano Thermal dissipation technology that is able to perform just as well as a memory module equipped with the usual heatspreaders. As you can see here, there are no heatspreaders on Kingmax's module.
A demo of Kingmax's Nano Thermal dissipation system shows the Kingmax memory module having a very decent operating temperature of less than 40 degrees Celsius.
Patriot's Booth
When we got to Patriot's booth, they were having one of the many shows that are popular among attendees, no thanks to the showgals present.
Patriot's Viper Sector 5 series of memory modules are rated up to DDR3-2500 and available in 4GB dual channel kits. It's obviously designed for enthusiasts, with its CAS latency of 9-11-9-27.
For those with Intel X58 motherboards, the Viper Sector 7 is the Intel equivalent of the Sector 5 series, as it's triple channel kits that's rated up to DDR3 2000. It also comes with 5-year warranty.
This aluminum Patriot Xporter Magnum Plus is ready for USB 3.0, though it is of course backwards compatible with USB 2.0.
The 200GB Patriot Inferno SSD is another that uses the SandForce controller.
PQI's Booth
PQI is quite optimistic about USB 3.0 adoption and has quite a substantial of its hardware supporting the new USB standard.
PQI had a demo system with its more notable USB 3.0 peripherals and drives attached.
This USB 3,0 SSD external HDD comes in two sizes, 80 and 160GB. PQI also claims that its TurboHDD USB software will increase the performance by up to 53%.
This external USB 3.0 HDD is a normal mechanical drive, with capacities at 320, 500 and 640GB.
Two of PQI's USB 3.0 flash drives, with the blue Cool Drive U368 with a max capacity of 128GB.
QNAP's Booth
QNAP was there to display its range of NAS and surveillance products.
The business class QNAP TurboNAS TS-859 Pro boasts eight hot-swapping bays with dual Gigabit LAN. It is both Citrix and VMWare ready with a complete Cloud based backup system.
The QNAP NVR-104 is designed for network surveillance for SMB and SOHO, with the ability to monitor, record and allow for video playback from the IP camera via the internet.
Another network video recorder, the VioStor VS-2012/2008 Pro is powered by an Intel Atom dual-core processor with 1GB RAM. With a storage capacity of up to 4TB for long term recording, this device supports recording from most popular network camera brands.
With QNAP's QMobile app for the iPhone, you can connect to your NAS using your iDevice through the internet to play the media stored at home.
Synology's Booth
Another firm specializing in NAS is Synology, which had a rather hip TV ad explaining what the company does and introducing its products screening at its booth.
Synology has a couple of apps for those on iPhone/iPod platforms; here the apps are installed on a iPad, allowing the streaming of media including music and images from a Synology NAS over LAN or the internet.
A demo of a song being streamed from the NAS server in the LAN to the iPad at the booth.
Synology is promising a new backup feature for the upcoming update to its DiskStation Manager operating system.
We got a sneak preview of the new Time Backup feature, which offers users the ability to backup their files with snapshot and versioning.
Here are a couple of Synology's RS810+ and RS810RP+ NAS for the small business environment.
For these rackmount NAS, one can simply remove the processor and memory in case of hardware failures, instead of sending the whole unit back for servicing.
The home user will do fine with the Synology DiskStation DS210+, which comes with support for two 3.5-inch HDD and has three USB ports and 1 eSATA port.
Team Group's Booth
Team Group is yet another manufacturer of flash storage, like SSD and memory modules.
The Team Xtreem LV DDR3-2400 dual channel 4GB kit here is rated at 9-10-10-30.
A 2.5-inch 5400RPM SATA external drive from Team, the TP1022 is USB 3.0 compatible with 8MB of cache.
This Team Xtreem S1 SSD comes in two types, SLC or MLC with a max read speed of 280MB/s and a write speed of 270MB/s,
Xigmatek's Booth
Xigmatek is known for its Direct Heatpipe cooler designs and we checked out its booth at Computex to find out what's new.
Unfortunately, most of Xigmatek's upcoming products were not yet ready to be shown to the media, with the sole exception of its Aegir CPU cooler, which uses the firm's distinctive H.D.T design (Heatpipe Direct Touch), as seen here.
Xigmatek's rep told us that the Aegir has a layered heat pipe design, with an extra layer of heat pipes on top of the heat pipes in direct contact with the CPU. This enhances the heat dissipation.
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