CES has been a show that
I’ve always wanted to go to but never had the chance to. I had planned a
vacation in Las Vegas
and the timing coincided with the last few days of the show. With the little
time I had, I only was able to book two appointments but both offered some good
information on some upcoming products.
Sapphire
My first appointment was
with Sapphire, makers of ATI products. They had a nice little meeting room in a
restaurant in the Venetian hotel. The fine folks at Sapphire reiterated the
fact that they are committed to quality for the upcoming year. Some of you
might not know, but every product that comes out of Sapphire is tested before
it gets into your hands. To help
communicate with their consumers, Sapphire’s website has been redesigned with
support for 18 different languages. CEO of ATI, David Orton, has confirmed that
Sapphire as being their number 1 partner.
Sapphire also stated that
they are committed to producing great motherboards based on ATI chipsets. They
showed me some of their packaging and one of the nice things I like about it is
that the boxes have a clear display of the motherboard inside. This way you can
check out the layout and features on the motherboard without having to open the
box. You may be wondering why all of the new motherboards don’t sport the cool
white coloring. The manufactures need a lot of work to clear out the dyes for
the PCB for each color. I hope that more of their motherboards come out in
white though as it’s a very striking color scheme.
A few other products were
shown but I am under NDA to disclose them. Rest assured they will be announced
soon and I’ll be able to post the pictures once the NDA is lifted.
Sapphire’s a great ATI
partner and I look forward to what they have coming out in the new year.
ECS
The fine folks at ECS has been very
helpful to us and they invited me to their meeting room up in the Tower Suites
of the new Wynn hotel. My first time at the Wynn, I was very impressed by the
design and décor of the place. I spent a good amount of time in the sports book
of the hotel watching an NFL playoff game. Before that though, I hopped on the
elevator up to the eighth floor to check out the goods from ECS
The one item that really
caught my eye at ECS’s display was the P60 Digital Home PC Viiv unit. This
small media center was pretty slick featuring a nice slot loading DVD-RW drive,
a 3-in-1 card reader, a firewire plug, and a USB 2.0 plug in the front. On the
back, you can see a DVI connector, two USB connectors, a few audio connections
and a Ethernet port. I use optical connections on all my media centers and I
was initially surprised to see a lack of one on the back of the P60. Unplugging
the one audio plug that was inserted, I see the familiar red glow leading me to
believe that that single jack is a versa jack. Coming in both black and white,
the unit can be placed vertically or horizontally. The unit ran very quietly
and didn’t seem to exhibit too much heat on the top. The P60 is one unit I’d
really like to test in the future to compare to the various media centers I
have built. The size and design is something I was really impressed with.
On the motherboard front,
ECS displayed a few that we’ve already reviewed or seen. One motherboard that
did catch my eye was ECS KA1 MVP. As you can see from the picture, this is the
AMD Crossfire solution. The one thing I
didn’t like about the board was the release clips for the PCI-E cards were just
little stubs. Instead of a full latch, the clips make it difficult to pop when
changing cards. I don’t know if the motherboards are in full production yet,
but I hope ECS decides to change that little part of the product. Other than
that, the board looks solid and I hope to be able to take it through its paces
soon.
Within ECS’s product guide,
they also mention the KA3 MVP which uses the RD580 motherboard chipset rather
than the RD480 on the KA1 MVP. The board features a Socket M2, something that
AMD is transitioning their desktop line to.
ECS had a very nice setup
away from the convention floor and I liked the calm and quiet atmosphere to be
able to look at their products. The P60 and the KA1 MVP are the two products I
really focused on and two that I’m very interesting to seeing once they are
made available.
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