AlphaCool and Mushkin
What do Alphacool and Mushkin have to do with one another? It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure that one out:



Mushkin is introducing their upgraded heat spreader for their memory modules which is based around a low restriction design with the help of Alphacool. An official announcement about this new heat spreaders will be made later this (or next) month.

Alphacool had the thinnest water block design seen yet on display, it cooled high end video cards, as well as motherboard chipsets, at only 4mm thick it’s surprising it works at all, but they assured us that there was water flowing throughout the water block design, and once their patent was accepted, they will make the internal design public; for now we can only show the exterior:


High end VGA cards become single slot again!


Ideal for dual GPU solutions like the Geforce 7950GX2!

New CPU water blocks, chipset blocks and compact pump/reservoir/radiator units were also shown at the Alphacool stand.



OCZ Technology

We already covered OCZ most innovative product, the OCZ Actuator with lets you play games by using brain waves, eye movement and facial expressions. But of course that was not all they were showing off this year.

If USB 2.0 memory sticks are too slow for you, how about Fire wire 800 models? The new Rally drives (v2.0) will be released soon, we got to see prototypes which fit in large and small firewire ports:



OCZ has partnered with different PSU manufacturers in the past to provide quality products to their customers, this tradition is not set to change, with their latest 1.2KW modular PSU:



On the memory front OCZ is striving to bring out the fastest DDR2 kits, the Flex-XLC series has gotten a speed bump up to PC2-11200 (1400Mhz!) at 2.35v in 2Gb kit, impressive!



The Reaper HPC series features a slightly less flashy heat spreader, but has the same high speed DDR2 chips inside:



According to OCZ the fastest 4Gb system memory you can have runs with 4 of these sticks, “only” rated PC2-6400 but at CAS3 (3-4-3) and very fond of OC:



CPU coolers are a newer area which OCZ is tackling this year with their Dominator heatsinks, the one of the left is released and should be in stores soon, the one on the right is a higher performance version:



The fins are larger to increase surface area:



But heat pipes are “old” news, so OCZ took a different approach to CPU cooling with the new HydroJet CPU cooler, this one is quite special as it combines water cooling and air cooling in one large unit; the radiators are put on the outer rim of the heatsink, while the center is kept clear for cool air to be drawn in. The motor which powers the fan also spins the water pump which pushes hot water from the CPU core through a long series of pipes which dissipate heat through the radiators. The prototype model has the radiators in full copper, which makes this unit very heavy, the retail version will be a combination of copper and aluminum; to help reduce weight:




Abandoning air cooling all together OCZ has been working on water cooling CPU blocks (with the help of Danger Den ? – check the demo stand), these new blocks will be out soon too: