Computex 2007: Thermaltake, ABIT, Corsair, Sapphire
Thermalright, Sapphire, and ABIT
Thermalright:
Walking down Hall 1, I noticed what appeared to be a condominium development on a new Intel X38 motherboard. In reality, it was a heatsink design that makes even the most over the top cooling designs from Thermaltake and Coolermaster seem perfectly reasonable.
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Thermalright was showing off a compilation of their new heatsink products all gathered together on one motherboard. There were giant CPU, memory, graphics, northbridge,
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Another outrageous product was a case that itself acts like a giant heatsink, with the side panel featuring the heatpipes that make contact with the CPU. Thermalright said that they are actually bringing this to market, but it couldn’t give any pricing figures. Although it is an interesting idea, a few problems come to mind with this design: one being that not all CPU sockets are in the same place on all motherboards, and the second being the fact that you would have to re-apply thermal paste to your CPU each time you open your side panel.
Sapphire:
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An interesting display at Sapphire’s booth was a dual Radeon X1950 Pro graphics card, named the Sapphire X1950 Pro Dual. As you can see from the bare-board pictures, there are two Radeon X1950 GPUs on board, each with 512MB of GDDR3 memory, with a relatively small dual-slot heatsink / fan. You can read our review of this card here.
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Sapphire was also showing off their HD 2600XT graphics card, with 256MB GDDR3 memory built in on an 128-bit memory interface and still undecided core and memory clock speeds.
ABIT:
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The big attraction at ABIT’s Computex booth was the overclocking setup put on by overclocking guru Robert Kihlberg. Using liquid nitrogen and ABIT’s P35 based IP35 Pro motherboard, we saw Kihlberg achieve a clock speed of 4.8GHz with his Core 2 Extreme QX6700 CPU.
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Also on display inside the booth was ABIT’s X38 based IX38 QuadGT motherboard. ABIT was still keeping the board’s cooling system a secret, but if the other X38 based motherboards that were on display during the show are any indication, there will likely be a lot of heatpipes involved. The IX38 will be one of two X38 motherboards introduced by ABIT in Q3 of this year, the other being the IX38-MAX. The main difference between the two will be the fact that the IX38 QuadGT will use only DDR2 memory, while the IX38-MAX will support only DDR3.
