Sidney

Welcome to the second installment of XYZ Computing's coverage of the 2005 Consumer Electronics Show. In case you have not seen our coverage yet, you may want to check out PART 1 or our supplementary Photo Gallery. As you probably know, the show was huge, so we are trying to break down our coverage into a few different sections. This is the only way that the 2400 companies, 1.5 million square feet, and four days of insanity can be sorted in even a semblance of order.

Link:
http://www.xyzcomputing.com/index.ph...49&Itemid=2 6

One of the most uninteresting topics of discussion, when it comes to PC components, are hard drives. This particular field in the computing industry simply doesn’t move at the same pace as other system components. When Intel and AMD launched their new platforms, the entire computing industry changed to better architectures, at least theoretically, with improved efficiency and better performance (let’s take Intel’s high-priced, immature platform out of the question for a moment and focus on developments). With newer platforms came new standards, but with hard drives, nothing much has changed. Sure, we saw Western Digital’s 10K RPM Raptors and Maxtor’s 16MB cache drives with NCQ, but is the time frame justifiable? Even after these developments, users are left wanting more out of this industry as a whole. That’s not to say that we expect hard drive manufacturers to develop hard drives like AMD, Intel, NVIDIA and ATI does with their CPUs and GPUs, but we would certainly like to see a set pattern where users can expect something significant in this industry. After talking to some manufacturers at the Consumer Electronics Show, we were surprised at what they had to say about the industry as a whole and their plans for 2005.

Article Link: http://www.cooltechzone.com/index.ph...d=914&Itemid=0

Lately, many users are complaining about the gaudy physical attributes of their computer cases. More and more manufacturers started concentrating on gaming cases after they received quite a bit of attention in the early days, but now user preference has changed, but gaming cases are still entering the market strongly. Many users pose concerns that manufacturers, such as Thermaltake and Sunbeam, have cases that are too "immature" for them. This is why Cooler Master, Silverstone and Lian Li has captured a fair share of the market and has always targeted "serious" customer base, so to speak. Well, your complaints were answered this year at the Consumer Electronics Show where many companies revealed their 2005 product roadmaps."

Review Link: http://www.cooltechzone.com/index.ph...d=916&Itemid=0

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Opteron 165 (2) @2.85 1.42 vcore AMD Stock HSF + Chill Vent II