Enermax has been known for its lineup of brilliant PSUs (I recall a Liberty 650w being a favourite in the NAG magazine about a year or so back) and has created a nice expansion to their current lineup of chassis to choose from – you can also only choose them if you live anywhere that trades nicely with the Dollar, doesn’t have guerrillas and isn’t called South Africa. (for now)
Hit the jump for a little more info. Are you taking the red pill or the blue pill?
Computex 2012 saw a good number of Taiwanese companies showcasing their new products for their respective specialised markets, with a few othera branching out into new areas to increase their market share. ASUS was one of the biggest names doing just about everything you can imagine, but there was another, lesser-known brand also trying to gain some time in the spotlight. And it wasn’t Aisan at all – it was German.
A lot of you might have been confused when you first saw the Cougar brand in stores online over two years ago. Reviews were scarce and there generally wasn’t much to go on other than the price, the listed features and the fact that most of their power supplies were 80 Plus rated. Brave souls who bought them direct from Pinnacle were pleasantly surprised – its like being recommended to buy a Hyundai Getz and finding that its actually quite a good car for its price. The company also makes computer chassis and a number of fantastic-looking cooling solutions and I’m really looking forward to the day when we can actually buy them without looking around for hours without getting hit on by real, actual cougars.
I showed you guys the insane dual-HD7970 Powercolour Devil 13 graphics card. Using three 80mm fans and taking up three PCI slots in your chass2is, its an exercise in excessiveness and shows AMD’s failure to reveal a HD7990 at Computex this year as an even bigger sore point. The card wasn’t the only monster hiding away at Computex, though there was something from HIS and even ASUS to gawk at.
First off, ASUS today is very unlike the company I knew tree years ago. Back then it was an als0-ran in the market, with the best products coming out of their ROG line, anything from the Maximus series and the DirectCU graphics line. Today things are very different with the company pushing their brand on all fronts and being generally the first name enthusiasts recommend. I’m done with their component announcements from Computex 2012, but cast thine eyes downwards, dear reader and salivate to your heart’s content.
What you see is something rather special. Its an ASUS P9X79 Deluxe motherboard that has gone through a Frankenstein-esque transformation. The board is a standard X79 affair up top with support for Intel’s Extreme chips on the LGA2011 socket, up to 128GB of RAM, ten SATA ports, two Thunderbolt ports, HDMI, DVI, USB 3.0 and full-on eight-channel audio. There’s also a kickass black-and-gold theme and a lot of thought went into the board’s design.
Oh, there’s also two graphics cards embedded into the board at the bottom. Yeah, I thought you should know that.
Hidden in plain sight on the Computex 2012 floor was a uninteresting Acer tablet that many people walked by. After all, there are tablets everywhere you look these days and the latest craze is all about Windows 8 and the new Transformer tablets. But this one is a little different. It may look cheap (it is) and it runs Ice Cream Sandwich but it does have something no-one else has – a Nvidia Tegra 3 chipset.
The cheap tablet is part of Nvidia’s Kai program which aims to get Tegra 3 into tablets as cheap as $199 with subsidies and a bit of help in the marketing department from the graphics giant. So far there haven’t been any units that have been borne out of the initiative, save for the Iconia Tab you see before you. The Verge has a little hands-on time and has some more info for you below.
Usually, one doesn’t associate ECS with a brand of any kind of good quality – mostly because you’ve never met people who actually own one. Both my graphics card and my board are ECS-branded and have been running like champs for the best part of two years. So when the company announced a completely new direction, I had to find out what that was, exactly. Turns out, the company has decided to bring back the Black series in full force with the help of a little Gold.
Starting off with their GTX680, the Black moniker is reserved for components that are usually certified for overclocking and high-end performance. The GTX680 Black starts off with a rather sexy black and gold colour theme with a bilateral blower setup, a large heatsink and five copper pipes cooling down the GPU, the RAM and VRMs all together. The board also features two Dual-link DVI ports, a full-sized HDMI-out and Displayport (in other words, its a reference board). Availability wasn’t discussed at the tradeshow, but you can bet it should hit our shores in a month or two’s time. Hit the jump for their matching motherboard.
ASUS has been on a roll at Computex with more announcements than I can keep up with and there are still a handful of motherboards to get through before I move on. The two boards you see below are Trinity socket FM2 motherboards. FM2 is different from socket FM1 and no processors can be brought over onto the newer hardware (sorry for the quad-core APU buyers, guess that’s the territory that goes with being a first adopter).
While the boards aren’t going to win shoot-outs with higher-end products anytime soon, the F2A85-M LE and the F2A85-M are going to be great budget choices for single or dual-GPU setups. They are both eATX designs and feature enough SATA ports to make any cash-strapped enthusiast happy. In particular, the F2A85-M would be my personal choice thanks to the rotated SATA ports, allowing you to use two graphics cards with as big a cooler as you desire without them getting in the way of anything else. Hit the jump for the full system specs.
At the ASUS stand at Computex there were also several revisions of the more popular boards they’ve been selling of late based on AMD’s 990FX chipset series. All the boards feature the 990FX chipset and the SB950 South Bridge, integrating native USB 3.0 ports, SATA 6.0 Gb/s and up to three graphics cards in SLI or Crossfire. And now it adds another feature in the form of a Thunderbolt header. The newcomers are to be sold as the Crosshair V Formula-Z (first pic), M5A99FX PRO R2.0 and M5A99X EVO R2.0 (second) and the Sabertooth 990FX R2.0 (third from left).
Stylistically the boards remain the same and retain their previous features, but now feature a Thunderbolt header, perfect for ASUS’ just-announced ThunderboltEX PCI-Express x4 add-in card. Expect these boards to go on sale very soon, with the card sold separately. Many AMD boards don’t feature support for the new connection standard that is making a case for itself in desktop setups with much less clutter and fewer cables, as well as supporting both displays and storage devices in the case of a Displayport-enabled Thunderbolt connection. All these boards also have a Displayport connector, providing a easy fit for the ThunderboltEX.
Source: TechpowerUp!
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Yes folks, I’m as surprised as you. AMD’s Brazos 2.0 platform is nothing but a rebrand of the previous family, but there are a few extra bits here and there that may make it worth the purchase for low-cost system builders. Brazos 2.0 still stays under the 18w maximum thermal design power and features the “new” Radeon HD7310 and HD7340 integrated graphics cores.
Because the original Brazos was a great product in its own right, AMD pushed up the clock speeds on both the processor and GPU, figuring that the extra power consumption would still stay within their power requirements. It then re-branded the chips and the graphics cores, figuring that a rose by any other name would smell as sweet. Hit the jump for my very short analysis.
But here are a few desktop samples for you to look at in the meantime! Before you get ahead of yourself though, AMD isn’t planning to launch Trinity processors for mobile until much later in Q3 of this year. Yeah, no, you’ll be better off checking things out at Christmas time if you’re looking for an upgrade for your laptop or netbook. Desktop users won’t have to worry, though.
Confused? I am too, but the company has been on a mission to make sense and sensible decisions lately, so I guess this is about right. AMD wants its third-party mobile manufacturers to sell out stock of Llano boards completely before they let Brazos 2.0 and Trinity hit the market. Rory Read has this minor issue with tons of Llano stock left waiting to be sold and wants that out (possibly at massively discounted prices) before the company gets their ducks in line with the revised Bulldozer design. While doing so, it can prioritise the production of Trinity and Brazos chips and also Piledriver for the desktop, as their predecessors suffered a lot of stock issues a couple of weeks from launch.
