CES 2007 Photo Report

As we shuffled along the show floor, we also came across a few interesting products in PQI's booth. Along with a myriad of memory kits and portable flash devices, PQI was showing off their solid state hard drives.

A number of solid state drives were on display in PQI's booth, of various capacities. The largest of which was a 64GB 2.5" SATA model.  The rest were IDE drives from 8GB to 32GB. Reps from PQI claimed performance of the drives wasn't up to par with standard hard drives in terms of transfer rates, but seek times showed a fast improvement. Clear pricing information wasn't available, but the 32GB IDE model was "around $1500", so the larger SATA model certainly won't be cheap.

No major product announcements came out of memory maker A-DATA, but while walking by their display we spotted a mean looking FB-DIMM on display. Fully Buffered DIMMs are used in high-end Intel server platforms, so they won't mean much for enthusiasts for now, but the beefy heat-spreader on A-DATA's FB-DIMMs caught our eye nonetheless.

The folks at Shuttle had some wild stuff on display in their suite at the Bellagio. In addition to a prototype car-computer and the new X200 media center PC, Shuttle was showcasing a number of small form factor XPCs, and the absolutely gorgeous SDXI (pictured here), which is part of the company's 1337 series of the systems. The SDXI supports Intel Core 2 processors and can run with a pair of Radeons in CrossFire mode thanks to its dual PEG slots. Additional cooling at the top of the unit keeps the cards cool.  Despite the wild flaming paint job, the SDXI was one of the coolest machines we've seen offered directly by any manufacturer.