Asrock

Quite a surprise showing this year from Asrock, usually known for their low-midrange products at good value, they now had very high end motherboards on display.

We couldn't believe our own eyes. Yes, Asrock is now offering triple SLI compatible products… in direct competition with their mother-company Asus:



Using a AMD chipset, Asrock is the first to showcase a mainboard which comes with the DisplayPort video connector. Well, the connector is not really onboard; Asrock is using a DisplayPort dongle to make it work.



Asrock X48 mainboard supporting FSB up to 1600MHz and DDR memory of the second and third generation. It has even a Wifi card inside the box, who would have thought that.



OCZ Technology

While OCZ main business was once memory modules, their booth main focus was not those products, they showed off their latest DDR2 and DDR3 products, using mainstream and enthusiast cooling solutions, going from simple heatspreaders, to heat pipes and even water cooling.



Answering the requests water cooling enthusiasts who used the first Flex cooled DDR2 kits, OCZ is now including all the necessary tubes and connection gear to hook up the custom heatsinks in your own water cooling loop with the Flex2. This is without a doubt the highest end memory module we have encountered yet:



The packaging has also been changed, no longer plastic blister, but a high quality cardboard box with classy design:



ESA (Enthusiast System Architecture) is making its way to the retail channel, any company not onboard with these latest innovation will be left behind. No surprise then that we saw an ESA tagged PC Power&Cooling power supply at the OCZ booth. Rated at 1200Watts this PSU can be yours for ~€400.




Memory modules and Solid State Drives go hand in hand; the latest generation of OCZ’s SSD disk will be faster than most hard drives, with write speeds at 100Mb/s!



Memory stick size has gone up a notch; maxing out at 32Gb with the OCZ ATV in the same small nearly indestructible design package. At the right side is the very fast Rally2 Turbo.



Like last year OCZ was again showing us their idea about new gaming peripheries. The Neural Impulse Actuator a.k.a. "brain mouse" has had many tweaks; the product pictured is actually a retail sample and will be available very soon. Like Piotke last year Geoffrey took the opportunity to strap on the headset and see for himself how good this product actually is. The first few minutes weren't that easy, bunny hopping all the time while ammunition was being shot every other second. With some practice it does work very good though, one of the seasoned testers show us his skills and we’re amazed about this new way of exploring the virtual world of gaming.



OCZ bought HyperSonic last year, an US based high end computer reseller, this year they will be pushing HyperSonic systems in Europe as well. We saw a few high end laptops with 8800M GTX in SLI, but also this rather compact powerful laptop; a screen size of 12.1” WXGA and Dual Core CPU at 2.4Ghz, has 100gb HDD and 2Gb ram, onboard video is ok for everything except gaming (Intel GM965).



These HyperSonic laptops can be had with SSD of course, and very fast DDR2 ram, PC2-6400 SODIMM is still quite rare for laptop memory.



Last product at the OCZ booth was this high end CPU water block, aims to compete with DangerDen and Swiftech products, the HydroFlow is near completion and ready for retail at a high end price.