While new products may have actually been a bit skint from the usual suspects at CES 2013, CoolerMaster has generally been reliable to provide new kit, and this year is no exception. Their engineers are nothing if not aggressively creative, but this year promised some particularly exciting hardware.

We missed the boat on reviewing the Storm Scout II enclosure, but a special "Ghost" edition is on the way and we'll be reviewing that along with their unique, boxy HAF xB case. I'm personally particularly interested in checking out the HAF xB, which is a more cube-shaped ATX case that actually stacks the motherboard and components into a separate compartment above the power supply and storage. I had a chance to see this case behind closed doors last year, and seeing it materialize on the market is exciting.

When I handled the radiator roundup, comprised of four new Corsair closed-loop coolers and two new NZXT closed-loop coolers, a couple of you mentioned CoolerMaster's impending Eisberg coolers. The good news is that the Eisberg is almost upon us, and the closed-loop cooler market is really starting to heat up. I'll resist making the obvious joke, but I'm keen to point out that the Eisberg line feature larger pumps and, especially important, copper radiator fins instead of the aluminum ones commonly found on existing products. The 240mm Eisberg in particular looked to be an absolute monster, and you can bet we'll be getting that in for review soon.

It's an amusing moment when a vendor catches you off guard with a product you think you already know about, but that's exactly what happened with CoolerMaster's new Cherry MX Green based keyboards. I thought the rep was talking about the lighting, but the switches themselves are actually a somewhat rarefied Green model different from the existing ones, and CoolerMaster has exclusive distribution rights in the States. So what's the MX Green like? My limited time with it suggested a switch that featured the same enjoyable typing feedback of the MX Blue, but was much more responsive for gaming. I've found myself pretty much swearing by the MX Reds for all-purpose use, but the MX Green may persuade me.

My media kit is languishing in the bowels of McCarran right now, but when I have access I'll update this post with images.

No trip to CES would be complete without a visit to SilverStone, but this year was especially important for me. I've been a longtime advocate of the Fortress FT02 as possibly the finest air-cooling enclosure ever built, but their Temjin TJ08-E took me (and even some of their engineers) by surprise. That Micro-ATX enclosure turned out to produce absolutely stellar thermal and acoustic performance with a single 180mm fan, strategically positioned, and I remember telling their rep after I'd reviewed it that I wanted a full ATX model. He demurred about as much as you conceivably can in an e-mail, which was all the confirmation I needed that something like it was in the works.

That something like it will be materializing as the Fortress FT04 and its less expensive cousin, the Raven RV04. Both share the same basic chassis (much as Antec's P280 and Eleven Hundred cases do), but the FT04 benefits from brand new AP182 fans, an attractive aluminum door, and a slicker finish overall. SilverStone's internal testing suggested that the FT04 might actually be able to outperform the venerable FT02 despite featuring one less fan due to smarter filter and grill designs that allow more air to pass into the enclosure. The FT04 also enjoys analog fan controls for both AP182 fans.

Unfortunately I don't have photos immediately available (they're enjoying a leisurely stay in my luggage, which is awaiting transfer to my plane back to the "friendlier" climates of the bay area), but they'll be added when available. In the meantime, the RV04 and FT04 are due to be launched soon, with prices hovering around $150 for the RV04 and $200 for the FT04. That makes them on the pricey side, but if they're anything like the FT02, they might just be worth the expense. More to come (including a review sample) soon.

I had a chance to briefly visit with ROCCAT (and hope to get some of their gaming mice and keyboards in for review soon) and walked away a bit stunned by what they were working on. What portended to be a meeting about high quality keyboards and mice turned out to be much more.

Their first product on hand was a mechanical keyboard which featured per-key programmable lighting along with assorted lighting effects and, happily, a wrist rest. Their Ryos mechanical keyboard includes audio pass-through and a dual port USB 2.0 hub, and actually includes dual ARM processors to handle all of its functionality.

What really blew me away, though, was the software solution they dubbed Power-Grid. Power-Grid is a fairly robust system monitoring application (although it's missing desperately needed GPU monitoring hooks), but it shines both in its extended functionality and the way that functionality becomes available to you...on your iPhone or Android phone. The Power-Grid phone app works over Wi-Fi, and essentially feeds system monitoring, instant messages, RSS feeds, and volume control for your PC to your phone, essentially adding a Razer Switchblade style UI to a touchscreen you already own.

That would be cool in and of itself, but where I think Power-Grid really takes the cake is the interface. Custom software solutions from companies not named Apple can tend to be very hit or miss, and this is doubly true of peripheral manufacturers. Yet Power-Grid's configurable interface is both attractive and incredibly intuitive. Even better, it can be used to create shortcut buttons to launch PC applications from your phone, and they even demonstrated an internal profile for Skyrim one of their developers put together in twenty minutes. That profile was essentially a 4x4 grid of shortcuts for the game that would toggle inventory, arm/disarm, running, and more.

What makes Power-Grid so attractive to me is the combination of a stellar UI and the fact that it explicitly does not demand investment in a hardware ecosystem the way something like Corsair Link might. If you have a smartphone and ninety-nine cents, you'll be able to use Power-Grid. ROCCAT's software makes use of things you already have, and it cheaply and effectively adds functionality to your system.

The beta is available on their site and worth checking out.

This CES, Corsair opted not to have a standard booth or suite. Instead they held a press event prior to CES proper, and unfortunately I wasn't able to attend. That disappointment is ameliorated somewhat by the fact that what was announced was the very definition of the word "flagship."

After starting with the Obsidian 800D enclosure and then gradually trickling down their designs to the eventual (and unfortunately underwhelming) Carbide 200R budget case, Corsair's gone back to the top and produced a new king of the castle in the Obsidian 900D. The 800D was an enthusiast chassis in its own right, but the 900D is another beast entirely, holding court with the likes of giants like the Azza Fusion, Thermaltake Level 10 GT, and perhaps most directly, the Cooler Master Cosmos II.

Even Corsair's own site admits the 900D is overkill, but that's really what the top dog on the product stack should be. The 900D features nine 2.5"/3.5" drive bays, three of which are hotswap, along with four 5.25" drive bays, and support for up to two power supplies and a staggering fifteen fan mounts. Basically, it's real big. We're hoping to have a review unit on hand before the end of February.

The 900D was the biggest announcement, but Corsair has also updated their gaming peripheral lines with a new keyboard and two new mice. The Vengeance K90 keyboard has been my weapon of choice for a long time; despite the spare use of rubber dome switches in an otherwise mechanical keyboard, the Cherry MX Red switches are fantastic, the wrist rest comfortable, and the keyboard's design is sexy enough to make Vivek blush.

From the looks of things, the K95 steps the K90's game up. Corsair continues to exclude a shroud in favor of letting the keys hover over the backplate, giving the keyboard a unique look and allowing it to be kept clean easily. The K95 also benefits from Cherry MX Red switches under every key, and has per-key configurable backlighting. Along with the K95, Corsair has updated the M60 and M90 mice to M65 and M95, but these refreshes are slightly less exciting, primarily updating the 5700dpi sensors to 8200dpi sensors with virtually no changes to the designs.

Finally, we have the Voyager Air and Flash Voyager GT Turbo. Corsair claims the Flash Voyager GT Turbo is the fastest USB 3.0 thumb drive on the planet, available at 32GB for $49, 64GB for $89, and 128GB for $179. The Voyager Air is a little more exciting (and a lot more flexible); this portable hard drive can be connected to via USB 3.0, Wi-Fi, or Gigabit Ethernet, essentially able to be used as a NAS and source for streaming video to all major platforms. It will come in capacities of 500GB for $199 and 1TB for $229.

QNAP is one of the NAS vendors known for providing affordable 10 GbE ready solutions, and they are continuing the trend with the TS-x70 series. At CES 2013, they are launching the TS-870U-RP 8-bay and TS-1270U-RP 12-bay models for cost effective NAS and iSCSI (IP-SAN) solutions. Both of them are 2U rackmount solutions. As with any rackmount storage product nowadays, the units are VMware, Citrix and Hyper-V ready. Based on a dual-core Intel Celeron processor running at 2.4 GHz, the units come with 4 GB of DDR3 by default (can be user upgraded to 16 GB). An important point to note is that ECC memory is not supported. Both units have dual GbE ports and two spare PCIe slot which can be used to add multi-port network cards (1 GbE or 10 GbE). QNAP claims that with 10 GbE cards, the units can provide more than 1800 MBps with 180K+ IOPS.

TS-870U-RP Hardware (The TS-1270U-RP has the same height, with the top row with the QNAP logo replaced by four drive bays)

Inside the TS-870U-RP

In addition, we have a new firmware release in the Turbo NAS 3.8.1 with updated support for IP cameras in the Surveillance Station Pro. The interface has also been updated along with some multimedia apps.

With the increasing popularity of IP cameras in the business as well as home consumer space, NAS vendors are also looking at creating specialized Network Video Recorder units. At CES, QNAP is introducing 2,4 and 6 bay models catering to this market segment in the VioStor VS-x100 Pro+ series. With built-in hardware decoding, surveillance footage can be viewed without going through a PC. QNAP is also preparing a Linux-based turnkey CMS-2000 central management system for PCs to monitor up to 1024 channels.

The final announcement from QNAP for CES was the enabling of the HDMI output on the tower NAS systems based on the Atom D2700 (TS x69L). With an inbuilt hardware decode accelerated XBMC client, QNAP is positioning the units as media players also.

We met up with Synology at CES today, and the main focus was on the recently released Disk Station Manager 4.2 firmware. Different NAS vendors take different approaches to accessing a NAS over the Internet. For example, Western Digital and Seagate set up the connection through their own servers, but most of the vendors opt for the port forwarding method. While it is straightforward for tech-savvy folks, it is not a simple plug-and-play option for the general user (which is why Western Digital and Seagate avoid it). In the recently reviewed LaCie 5big NAS Pro, LaCie tried to automatically forward the necessary ports using the uPnP port forwarding method (which sets up the port forwarding rules in gateways which support it). It didn't particularly work well with the NAS behind a couple of switches. Synology is also aiming to tackle the problem with an improved Quick Connect. The claim is that there is no need for port forwarding to enable remote access, and we will check out how this works as soon as we get back from CES. It appears that Synology uses a relay mechanism wherein the QuickConnect ID is made available to a Synology server for the initial handshake.

Other updates in DSM 4.2 include DS cloud updates for better iOS support, an improved Package Center and an updated Cloud Station 2 allowing for nearly unlimited accounts and sync folders. The apps also get some updates with DS Video expanding mobile platform support, DS Photo+ getting auto-sync for iOS devices and Video Station going the HTML5 route to work without browser plugins and Audio Station support for streaming to Bluetooth speakers.

From the SMB / SOHO perspective, DSM 4.2 adds support for Amazon's Glacier cloud backup service. Synology High Availability (SHA), a scheme in which one NAS acts as an active server and a second one takes over seamlessly when there is a failure in the active one (because the two servers are being synced continuously), is now available for all x86 models. Synology also indicated that all the x86 models are VMware vSphere 5 VAAI and Windows Server 2012 certified.

ioSafe CEO Rob Moore with the ioSafe N2

The ioSafe N2 also had a place of honour in the Synology booth. We covered the announcement of the ioSafe N2 back in September. It is basically a Synology DS213 motherboard in a chassis designed by ioSafe for disaster resistance while also allowing users to replace the hard disks if necessary. ioSafe had promised that the unit would ship by January, and true to their word, our review unit shipped right on time. We will be taking a closer look at the unit later this month.

We’re not likely to be running DDR4 any time soon on desktops, and even most laptops are probably over a year away from getting the upgrade, but now is the time to prepare for the shift. To that end, Micron (Crucial) has a DDR4 demonstration running at CES 2013. The system is an Intel test platform with undisclosed internal hardware, affectionately (or perhaps not) referred to as the Frankenstein Box. My guess is that there might be an Ivy Bridge, Sandy Bridge-E, or current-gen Xeon running in the box with a converter board of some sort to allow the DDR4 to talk to the DDR3 on-die controller (similar to the RDRAM to SDRAM converters we saw back in the Pentium 4 Rambus days), but how they’re running it right now isn’t particularly important so much as the fact that they are able to run Windows. It’s just as possible that the box has an unannounced next generation Xeon with a DDR4 controller. But I digress….

The systems wasn’t open for inspection, but Crucial had an oscilloscope showing the signals on the test unit and a bootable Windows 7 platform running a bouncing balls simulation, which is what we usually see with early/prototype/Frankenstein systems. The memory was running at 2133MHz, apparently with similar timings to what we currently see with DDR3-2133, so at launch the base DDR4 speeds are going to be around twice as fast as what we saw with DDR3. The test platform unfortunately is limited to 2133MHz as the maximum clock; Crucial said they’re seeing 2400-2800MHz without any trouble, and the JEDEC DDR4 specifications currently go up to DDR4-3200. Worth note is that DDR4 makes some changes to help reduce power use, including dropping the standard voltage to 1.2V (down from 1.5V with DDR3), and we’ll likely see low voltage and ultra low voltage DDR4 in the 1.0-1.1V range.

The standard memory chips are now 4Gb compared to 2Gb for most DDR3, which makes 4GB single-sided and 8GB double-sided DIMMs the starting capacity. The initial target devices will be servers where the improved memory density and power savings are needed most, effectively doubling the amount of RAM we’re likely to see at similar price points/configurations to the current generation DDR RAM. Crucial will be releasing a full portfolio of products based off the memory chips, including RDIMMs, LRDIMMs, SO-DIMMs, and UDIMMs (standard and ECC). Mobile and desktop adoption of DDR4 is expected to occur in 2014. One change Crucial pointed out with their UDIMMs can be seen in the photo above: the edge with the 284 pins is no longer perfectly straight. The idea is that when you insert a DDR4 DIMM, it will require less pressure as you’ll only be pushing in about half of the pins at a time.

Besides the DDR4 demonstration, Crucial had a display showing their various memory modules over time, from DDR through DDR4. It’s always fun to see how far we’ve come over the past eight or so years. At the top we have a DDR DIMM with 184 pins—state-of-the-art circa 2001/2002. Launch speeds were DDR-200 (PC1600), with capacities of 128MB to 1GB being typical over the life of the product. DDR2 moved to 240 pins around 2003, launching at DDR2-400 and moving up to DDR2-1066 by the end of its life cycle; typical capacities ranged from 256MB to 2GB. 2007 brought about the advent of DDR3, and while there are technically DDR3-800 parts, for the mainstream market DDR3 started at 1066 and has officially moved up to DDR3-2133; capacities are generally in the 512MB to 4GB range, with 8GB being the maximum. And last we have DDR4, launching by the end of the year. If the pattern continues, we should see DDR4-4266 by the time DDR5 memory is ready for mainstream use and capacities will start at 2GB and likely top out at 16GB (possibly more) per module.

The Avenger MPQ8064 Reference Design

Tucked away in the Qualcomm both were a few reference designs intended to show off the potential of the Snapdragon S4 Prime SoC (MPQ8064), a derivative of the APQ8064 with four Krait cores and the Adreno 320 GPU and revealed at CES 2012. In-house Qualcomm built out a large set-top box that apes their MDPs with every connectivity and device feature you could imagine. The other two were designed by partners as proof of concepts, and are quite attractive. The Avenger (pictured above) is absolutely minute, but fully functional with HDMI out and microUSB for power and storage, along with microSD storage. LG Innotek had a more traditional mock-up that could still look good sitting in a living room. 

Micron/Crucial briefed us on their new M500 line of SSDs, which upgrades the controller to the Marvell 88SS9187-BLD2 along with moving to 20nm Micron MLC NAND. Along with the NAND process shrink Micron is bringing higher capacity SSDs down to previously unheard of prices—particularly for what should be high performance, high quality SSDs. The M500 line will launch with 120/240/480/960GB models, in 2.5”, mSATA, and M.2 (formerly NGFF) form factors. Full pricing information isn’t available yet, but Micron is promising the 960GB drives will cost under $600. We’ve basically seen the same sort of drive upgrade from Plextor already with the M5 Pro, though both Plextor and Micron of course provide their own customized firmware. Note also that both the Micron and Crucial versions will use the same M500 branding, which will hopefully alleviate any confusion this time around. Here are the core specs for the four capacities.

There are a few key points worthy of note. One is that the M500 posts lower transfer rates and IOPS than the M5 Pro, though of course these are all paper specs so take them with a grain of salt. The other interesting item is that Micron is now going with more overprovisioning than on their previous model SSDs. We’ve seen the effect of spare area in our recent testing, so the move from 7% spare area (the difference between GiB and GB) to 14.5% spare area will improve the worst-case performance. Another item to note is that the 2.5” enclosures are now all 7mm thick, and they ship with a free 9.5mm adapter. All of the M500 line includes hardware AES 256-bit encryption, and Micron showed us an array of small capacitors on one of the M.2 form factor drives that supported flushing of all data to the NAND in the event of a power loss--not a super capacitor as seen in enterprise class SSDs, but there's no RAM cache to flush so it's just an extra precaution to ensure all of the data writes complete.

At this point, we’re now getting very close to the limits of the SATA 6Gbps interface, so some performance improvements over the previous generation M4 aren’t all that huge. Read speeds have improved from 415MB/s on the M4 series and write speeds are up from 260MB/s on the larger models; on the other hand, 4K IOPS almost double from 40K/50K read/write (again on the larger models), so random performance should be substantially better. Reliability has been quite good with Micron/Crucial drives over the past couple years, and the new drives will hopefully continue that legacy. Availability I believe should be Q2 2013 (Micron wasn't specific on this),  and we’ll have full performance reviews when we get samples.

I've typically been a big proponent of getting smaller vendors exposure if they have some great products on hand, and my brief meeting with Deepcool suggested to me that there's a lot of potential there. Deepcool is a startup based out of Beijing with a few solid-looking, well-priced heatsinks to their credit.

The coolers aren't super exciting, but many have direct-touch heatpipes and all have compelling prices; the 400 in the bottom right corner looks to be competitive with the Cooler Master Hyper 212 line with its $29 price tag, and Deepcool is slowly making inroads towards distribution in the United States with vendors like NewEgg. They're also working on opening an office in Los Angeles, California.

Deepcool also had on offer a line of fans, but interestingly their 140mm fan still uses standard 120mm mounts, making it an interesting upgrade opportunity for end users who want to get a little more cooling power in their system without having to run a fan at a higher speed.

Finally, Deepcool had this monster on offer. This is a heatsink with eight individual heatpipes (no direct touch cooling), and should provide pretty stellar cooling power when paired with the right 120mm fans.

As with many smaller companies it's a wait and see approach, but we'll be evaluating Deepcool products as they become available to let you know if you should be keeping an eye on them.

I dropped by the Intel booth to see what they had on display, and as expected that had a full lineup of Ultrabooks from various manufacturers. We’ve covered many of these in some form already, but I wanted to grab some pictures and give a unified list of all the touchscreen Ultrabooks being shown at the Intel booth. From there we’ll move on to a discussion of the larger Ultrabook market and what it really means.

Starting with the convertible tablets, in no particular order we have the Lenovo Twist, Dell XPS 12 Duo, a Gigabyte twist-style offering, Lenovo’s Yoga 13, Toshiba’s Slider, and the Sony VAIO Duo 11 slider. Note that the recently announced Lenovo Helix and MSI S20 aren’t present, and likely quite a few other Core series convertibles are also missing, but at least that covers most of the options. The good news is that the vast majority of these convertibles have decent screens—many are 1080p IPS displays, which is really what they all need to be, but the Gigabyte at least is clearly a TN panel. The colors are still clearly off, and for the price we should be getting displays pre-calibrated by the OEM (*cough* Apple *cough*), but let’s steer clear of that topic for a moment.

Moving over to the touchscreen Ultrabooks, again in no particular order we have the Dell XPS 13 Touch, Acer’s Aspire M, HP Envy TouchSmart, Lenovo U310 Touch, ASUS UX31A Touch, Samsung Series 7, and the Acer Aspire S7. (Note: I didn’t carefully note each of the laptop models, so I might have some of those wrong.) The overall quality and design of these Ultrabooks is hit or miss, with some having nice looking screens and others using cheap 1366x768 TN panels. All of them have touchscreens of course, but I can’t help but feel some of the OEMs are shooting their products in the foot before they even get out the door.

If you’ll pardon me while I go off on a short rant, making a thin touchscreen Ultrabook isn’t the holy grail of laptop computing. Some people will love touchscreen laptops and others won’t; some people love thin laptops and others don’t care all that much. That’s the way things are and the way they’ve always been: you can’t please all of the people all of the time. The problem is that where certain products are thin and have a good industrial design and sell well with high profit margins (I hate to keep saying this, but: Apple), it’s not just the thinness and the industrial design that makes them sell. It’s the entire ecosystem in the product, from the chassis and screen through the keyboard and touchpad; from the speakers and color quality to the battery life, solid state drive, and on to the operating system and apps.

Rare is the Ultrabook that actually gets all of these areas right—and in fact, I’d say that so far it doesn’t exist. There are good Ultrabooks with IPS panels, but they’re not factory calibrated to display accurate colors. There are Ultrabooks with touchscreens, but several that I’ve played with also have touchpads that just don’t work as well as they should. By requirement, all Ultrabooks need some form of solid state storage, but we have pure SSD solutions with good controllers, pure SSD solutions with at best adequate controllers, and hard drives with SSD caches that in many cases are too small to be beneficial. Not everyone is going to want or need every aspect of their next laptop/Ultrabook to be “perfect”, but when we start getting into the $1200+ price range, the number of cut corners and compromises needs to approach zero. To create a premium product worthy of a premium price, you need all of those things—and when you have products that cost half or even a third as much, it takes serious convincing to get people to invest in premium offerings, especially when those offerings are still flawed. But it’s more than just matching what Apple is doing, because even if you have the perfect Windows alternative to the MacBook Pro Retina, the fact is that you’re still not going to be able to charge Apple prices and move the same amount of units.

Out of all the Ultrabooks I saw at Intel’s booth (or elsewhere at CES), I think the current best candidates are on a short list, and all of them still have potential issues. Dell’s XPS 12 Duo is quite cool and works better than I expected, but it’s a bit thick for a tablet and the colors out-of-the-box are very much not correct—and in fact, none of the Ultrabooks I’ve seen look like they’re anywhere near having an out-of-the-box DeltaE of less than four with a color gamut that at least covers all of sRGB. (DeltaE of 10 with spikes up to 15-20 and a <55% color gamut? Yes, we have that!) Frankly, anything with a 1366x768 TN touchscreen never should have gotten past the prototype stage without getting a better display. Acer and ASUS have potential issues with their storage subsystems (SanDisk controllers and/or RAID 0 SSD arrays), and the touchpads on every Ultrabook I’ve used for more than a few minutes are still lacking. Lenovo’s ThinkPad Helix is still high on my list, but the latching mechanism gives me pause. Samsung’s Series 7 touchscreen Ultrabook might be the best of the breed when we get right down to it, but I haven’t spent enough time with it to say for certain.

So after looking at more than a dozen different Ultrabooks, my short list has Samsung, Lenovo, Dell, and ASUS still hanging around—and most of the MSRPs are still several hundred dollars too high to warrant a strong recommendation. I’m sure all of Intel’s partners would love for Ultrabooks to become 50% or more of the global PC shipments, but until we deal with some of the above issues I just can’t see that happening. For the time being, Ultrabooks are here to stay and there are going to be plenty of people that like what the overall platform delivers, but there are even more people that will be disenfranchised by the high prices, missing features, or other issues and they will go looking at other alternatives. Perhaps they’ll end up with another budget laptop, or maybe they’ll make the switch to the growing tablet market. Whatever happens, the next few years should prove interesting.

Visiting Lian-Li's CES booth is usually at least an interesting experience. I often feel like the engineers and designers there just get an idea for an enclosure and "go for it," which results in a mad doctor's laboratory of experiments. Sometimes you get failed experiments (the PC-A55), sometimes you get great ones (the PC-90), but there's always something going on that's at least worth looking at. As I was telling Vivek the othe night, even if a unique product is bad, at least someone did it so nobody ever has to again. By the same token, though, if experimenting yields fruit, we all benefit.

Case designers often hesitate to produce an enclosure that's necessarily wider than the standard, so the V850 on display is an interesting choice. The side panels pop off in the same fashion as Corsair's Obsidian 600T, and the rear struts are replaced with casters. Inside is a wealth of fans directed squarely at the graphics card, CPU, and motherboard area; the case is designed for cooling performance first and foremost, with noise being a distant secondary consideration. I was keen to point out to the Lian-Li rep, though, that fan controllers were very common at this year's CES at almost any price point. Hopefully this will change in time for next year.

I was taken with the Q30, though I'm exceedingly skeptical about the cooling design. Thankfully this is a prototype, but it's certainly intriguing. It features a Mini-ITX mount, single half-height expansion slot, and two USB 3.0 ports in the front. The cooling is handled by a single 120mm fan that sits behind the motherboard, but that fan is actually an exhaust. I think the idea is to pull air in through the side vents, over the components, and out of the back of the case, but in practice I suspect that moving air will simply bypass the components entirely.

We're looking to get more and more Lian-Li enclosures in during 2013, and I'm looking forward to having some of these more exotic designs in for testing. Sometimes you get a PC-A55, but sometimes you get a PC-90, and I'm really anxious to see when that happens.

I stopped by Allwinner today to discuss their recently announced and now-shipping A31 SoC. The A31 is based around four ARM Cortex A7 CPUs and a Power VR SGX544MP2 GPU, all built on TSMC's 40nm G process. In addition there's a fifth power saver (likely A7) core on A31 which has a lower frequency, an arrangement curiously similar to NVIDIA's shadow core — this core is likely synthesized for better power efficiency. I asked for details about CPU and GPU clocks since these weren't readily available in the launch announcement, and was told that A31 was shipping with the A7s clocked at 1.0 GHz, although the platform could go higher to around 1.2 GHz if an OEM chooses. GPU clocks on the SGX544MP2 are around 350 MHz or higher as well. Allwinner also claims to have built its own video encode and decode blocks for the A31 which is what enables the platform to decode UHD (4K) content at 30 FPS. Allwinner says that the A31 is starting out with a price of around $20 but fully expects this to go down to half or even lower during its life cycle. A31 is targeted at tablets, smartphones, TVs, ARM based notebooks, and of course small Android-running media playback boxes. 

Allwinner also noted that it has an A20 SoC coming with dual core ARM Cortex A7s and Mali-400MP2 graphics which is pin compatible with A10 for easy design reuse. There's also obviously a Cortex A15-based Allwinner SoC in the works, but no word on how many cores that design will have.

Allwinner isn't as well known as some of the other SoC vendors in the US, but abroad in mainland China and other markets Allwinner has significant market share and penetration thanks to aggressive pricing. I've started to see Allwinner-based tablets emerge in the US on Amazon and other online retailers built by small one-off device manufacturers, in the future this will likely increase. There also has been an influx of Allwinner-based, Android-running media playback boxes I've noticed. 

Allwinner had two tablets with A31 inside that are already shipping, built by Chinese device maker Onda. The Onda V812 which is built around an 8-inch XGA display, includes 2 GB of RAM, 16 GB of storage, 5 MP rear facing camera and 3 MP front facing camera. The Onda V812 is available from some online retailers for $180 USD which is very competitive, construction is aluminum and I was impressed by how well built it felt. 

In addition I played with the 9.7-inch V972 which I'm told includes the same display that Apple sources for its iPad 4 — 9.7 inch, 2048 x 1536 IPS, which looked brilliant. I felt like SGX544MP2 was a bit under powered to drive this, but the UI was performant. Curiously enough Onda also claims to have the iPhone 4 camera module for the 5.0 MP rear camera, and 2.0 MP front facing camera. Perhaps the most intriguing part is the $239 price point online. Imported into the US and running stock Android, I feel like price points such as these could easily disrupt some things. I ran sunspider on the two Allwinner tablets, scores are visible in the gallery. Allwinner was quick to remind me that even though A31 and devices are shipping that optimizations are ongoing.

I feel like we are going to see a lot more from Allwinner and a lot more devices with Allwinner inside in the future. 

Zalman's booth this year featured a single enclosure they're pushing, but the real news was in the CPU and GPU coolers they had on hand. Specifically, they had two very unique CPU coolers: a fanless air-cooler, and a custom closed-loop liquid cooler that can't (at least readily) trace its ancestry back to Asetek or CoolIT.

First out of the gate is the Zalman Cube. This is an enormous fanless air cooler designed to take advantage of the normal airflow in your enclosure, but due to its nature it's not meant for overclocking. You can remove a top panel and install a 120mm fan inside the cube to add active airflow, but this is basically a large passive cooler.

The other exciting cooler is the Zalman C1. I'm used to seeing Asetek and CoolIT liquid coolers, but the C1 is neither, featuring a custom waterblock and a custom radiator that employs circular heatpipes. Zalman talked up the performance (as one would expect), but it would be interesting to see if the radiator that looks awfully similar to a high end CPU heatsink can do a better job than the traditional radiator. Zalman has had highs and lows, but their coolers have never been terrible.

Much like the other case and cooling vendors, Zalman had a series of other air coolers, cases, and updated power supplies on hand, along with a healthy number of peripherals. They continue to offer excellent aftermarket VGA cooling, but they (like so many of us) lamented the lack of real standardization on video card construction. Hopefully mounting systems will get at least slightly easer in the future, but if the mountain of torx screws in the OEM NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680 are any indication, I wouldn't hold my breath.

I felt like CES 2012's case designs were fairly predictable: companies that could be expected to produce great stuff produced more great stuff, while other companies that were a little more hit and miss continued to be hit and miss. Yet 2013 has seen some upset. While I personally like some of In-Win's older products for the value they provide, a lot of the aesthetics were caught up in the "gamer" mentality. In-Win still has a couple of ostentatious cases on hand, but they have some very original thinking going on as well.

The In-Win D-Frame is a limited edition and at a staggering $349 it isn't cheap, but it's definitely unique. Construction quality is very high; the piping isn't steel but aluminum, and the clear side panel is actually glass and not acrylic or plastic. Obviously this isn't for the garden variety enthusiast or anyone that owns a cat, but it's an eye-catcher and worth at least remarking on.

The H-Frame is another wild open air chassis, a series of aluminum fins that produce a simple, interesting shell. This is fundamentally an ATX enclosure, but check out the inside.

Ignoring the fact that I like blue, the interior of the enclosure is at least interesting to see. There are three 3.5" drive bays along with a 2.5" drive tray, and the "tray" at the far right is actually a fan mount. Again, the H-Frame may not be for everyone, but it's still slick to just look at.

Outside of these two interesting pieces, In-Win had a selection of more fairly basic enclosures similar to the GROne, although they did have some remarkable budget Micro-ATX cases that we hope to get in for review. Truthfully I'm surprised Micro-ATX has stagnated and is continuing to, as the ATX and larger form factors just offer less and less compelling reasons to employ them. Mini-ITX is perfectly adequate for a basic system now, while multi-GPU users or anyone who needs an expansion card can still be served perfectly fine by a Micro-ATX board.

The past two years has seen system integrators start to really diversify amongst themselves, but iBuyPower and CyberPowerPC in particular have been making strong inroads into retail. This CES, iBuyPower made a tremendous step from being a successful system integrator and boutique to a full on PC vendor by firing a shot across Alienware's bow with the Revolt.

The Revolt is fully custom, top to bottom. While iBuyPower and NZXT have traditionally had close ties, the Revolt's chassis was designed completely in house by iBuyPower. A custom chassis is noteworthy in and of itself, but what sets the Revolt apart is the fact that literally everything is custom. The motherboard may be manufactured by ASRock, but it was designed by and is supported by iBuyPower, using a standard Z77 chipset but with no video outputs on the rear I/O cluster. It's essentially a custom mITX design, and from there they use a PCIe bridge to rotate the graphics card ninety degrees. The CPU is also cooled by a 140mm radiator, presumably the same Asetek radiator employed by NZXT for the Kraken.

Dimensions aren't super diminutive and it's not quite as small as the X51, but at 16"x16"x4", the Revolt is still a fairly slim machine and includes an internal 80 Plus Gold certified power supply. Base specs for all models include a single 2.5" bay, a 3.5" bay, and an mSATA slot, as well as a slot-loading DVD burner, media card reader, two DIMM slots, and built-in 802.11b/g/n wireless and Bluetooth.

iBuyPower is being especially aggressive with the Revolt, angling to get it into retail with as wide availability as possible (already due to appear at Fry's, MicroCenter, and Best Buy Canada), but also with a remarkably low price tag.

Specifications are a little spare with the details for individual SKUs, but the base model starts at just $649. That gets you an Intel Core i3 processor, mechanical hard disk, and impressively for a retail gaming machine, a GeForce GTX 650. Try to remember that retail "gaming" systems, even those sold by iBuyPower and CyberPowerPC, still tend to shortchange the graphics card. The GTX 650 isn't spectacular, but it's a very strong starting point.

The next SKU up runs $899, and upgrades the CPU to an i5-3570K (overclocking ready) and the GPU to a GeForce GTX 660.

Finally, the full fat Revolt includes an overclockable i7-3770K, a GeForce GTX 680, and an SSD for $1,399. Those are essentially top-of-the-line specifications before you start getting into Sandy Bridge-E or multi-GPU gaming systems.

iBuyPower is taking pre-orders now, and will be shipping Revolts in February 2013.

News of the Lenovo - EMC joint venture, LenovoEMC crossed the wires last week. We met with Iomega yesterday at CES and discussed what this means for the storage market. The NAS space (in particular, the SMB market) is growing by leaps and bounds, and there are multiple players already established in the space. Iomega has had big success in the European and South American markets, and it is also trying to break into the North American market. Iomega's parent company, EMC, is a proven enterprise leader in the storage market with an international presence. On the other side, PC and server vendors have had steady sales in the enterprise space, and are looking to provide more value to their customers.

PC vendors have typically promoted third-party NAS solutions as shared, centralized storage for the computers and servers being sold. In this situation, it would make sense for them to bundle NAS units as well in order to increase profit margins and also provide consumers with a one-stop shop for support purposes. With this in mind, the LenovoEMC joint venture was created with Lenovo owning 51% stake and EMC owning 49% stake under Lenovo's Enterprise Products Group. While the px-series could contribute to Lenovo's enterprise server and storage initiative, the ix-series could end up being used with Lenovo PCs and workstations.

In terms of product offerings, LenovoEMC confirmed that all products announced in 2012 are now shipping as scheduled. Their current product lineup is presented in the picture above. We have LenovoEMC's ix4-300d in-house for review. Readers can look forward to a detailed review in early February.

All of the memory makers seem to have embraced the selling of flash memory devices--be they USB sticks, SSDs, SD flash for cameras, etc. Typically, USB sticks have settled on lower performance controllers with an emphasis more on sustained sequential transfer rates rather than pure performance.

Mushkin appears to be the first company set to pursue true SSD-class performance with their upcoming USB stick that features a SF-2281 controller. The drive is capable of read/write speeds over 300MB/s (380/325MB/s), and Mushkin mentoned IOPS of around 15K if memory serves. Those speeds are quite a bit lower than native SATA solutions, but Mushkin is using a SATA to USB host chip and the overhead involved lowers maximum performance somewhat--though it should still be much higher than other solutions.

Generally speaking, random IO speeds aren't all that important for USB sticks, but for accessing lots of small files Mushkin's device should prove quite speedy. They're also billing it as an excellent platform for Windows To Go, and the SandForce controller and improved IOPS should certainly help with such uses.

The device we were shown at the Mushkin suites is currently a prototype, so the industrial design isn't complete, but we're told it's fully functional (or at least it was until they started taking it apart and letting technology enthusiasts handle it). The Ventura Ultra will be available in capacities of 60/120/240GB, though pricing and launch dates are not yet known.

In a somewhat unrelated post, I also grabbed some additional shots of the 480GB Atlas mSATA SSD. Here you can see the two boards that make up the device. It's apparently right at the limits of the mSATA specifications, but some laptops apparently have smaller mSATA chambers that aren't able to contain the Atlas.

Like many memory companies, Mushkin has also added a selection of flash memory and SSD products to their portfolio. Their current Chronos and Chronos Deluxe lines cater to the consumer and enthusiast sectors, respectively, but now Mushkin is going after the more lucrative enterprise sector with their ProSpec SSD line.

The ProSpec drives will all use the SandForce SF-2582 controller, with enterprise class MLC. The remaining features are common to other SandForce-based drives (128-bit AES hardware encryption, TRIM support, wear leveling, etc.), and the PrSpec drives come with a 3-year warranty. Mushkin specs the drives to deliver random read/write performance of 80K/42K IOPS with sustained transfer rates of 560MB/s, with capacities ranging from 100GB to 400GB.

Based on the capacities, that means Mushkin is increasing the amount of overprovisioning from the typical 14% (7% in cases with “zero” overprovisioning, e.g. certain ADATA models) that we see in consumer drives to a healthy 37%. As we've shown in our recent SSD testing, increased spare area and/or overprovisioning can have a dramatic impact on performance, so the ProSpec line should be competitive in terms of performance. Reliability and other aspects are of course often more important in the enterprise sector, but Mushkin does include a large capacitor to prevent data loss in the event of an unexpected power failure.

Mushkin’s press release did not specifically list an availability date or pricing information, but it appears the ProSpec drives should be available shortly. We’ll update if we can get more details.

We have covered CES announcements from Netgear and D-Link already and we now move on to TRENDnet. Despite being headquartered in Torrance in southern California, they seem to have had better success in Latin and South America than in the USA market. Apparently, things have been changing and they have steadily started increasing their market share in NA starting in 2007 - 2008. Given that we have been hearing about TRENDnet products for quite some time, we took the chance at CES to go and look at their offerings.

The star of the show was undoubtedly their dual spatial stream 802.11ac USB 3.0 dongle. Last year, we saw 802.11ac USB 2.0 dongles, but even a single spatial stream in 802.11ac can provide up to 433 Mbps. Therefore, many users were wary of purchasing these dongles. USB 3.0, on the other hand, provides enough bandwidth for multiple spatial streams. The TRENDnet TEW-805UB can connect to either a dual spatial stream 802.11ac network for 867 Mbps of theoretical throughput or a dual spatial stream 802.11n network for 300 Mbps of theoretical throughput. The TEW-805UB will ship in April 2013 with a MSRP of $70.

TRENDnet has been reliant on Qualcomm Atheros silicon for their routers so far. Due to this, they have been late in jumping on to the 802.11ac router scene since Broadcom has the only shipping radio solution. Similar to the 802.11ac routers launched by Buffalo and Netgear last year, the TRENDnet TEW-812DRU uses a Broadcom solution for both the radios and the processor.

The TEW-812DRU is scheduled to ship later this month with a MSR of $230 (with the street price expected to be similar to other 802.11ac routers at $180).

Some of the other products introduced by TRENDnet at CES include the TV-IP851WC and TV-IP851WIC pan / tilt / zoom cloud cameras (TRENDnet's name for IP surveillance devices with automatic monitoring over the Internet and local network using mobile apps or a web browser), TEW-717HRE and TEW-713HRE compact wireless 802.11n range extenders and the TPL-407E / TPL-407E2K compact powerline adapters with passthrough capabilities.