Thread: Anandtech News

Over the past year we've had the pleasure of testing more and more SilverStone enclosures, but the case and power supply designer is not content to rest on their laurels. We had a chance to check out what's to come when we visited their suite at CES.
First, if you were a fan of the oddball FT03 like I was, SilverStone had on display a Mini-FT03. Essentially an even smaller version, the Mini-FT03 supports a Mini-ITX board, SFX power supply (not included), and features two expansion slots. Side panels snap on instead of sliding on (a problem with the bigger FT03), and the whole enclosure is cooled by a large 180mm intake fan at the bottom.

They're also introducing a new Temjin TJ04, a fairly standard-looking (at least at first glance) ATX enclosure that has more than a few tricks up its sleeve. While most ATX enclosures pay lip service to using a bottom-mounted intake, the TJ04 seems tailored for it. SilverStone includes removable drive cages, and the enclosure is supposedly able to support up to nine hard drives and five SSDs: more than most users will ever need. Finally, there's a side intake built in designed more to deflect cool air off of the hard drives and through the rest of the tower.

SilverStone's usual gamut of accessories were also in attendance, along with a faster, more powerful 180mm Air Penetrator fan and an updated USB 3.0 card with the new NEC Renesas chip that promises increased performance.

Finally, SilverStone continues to round out and toughen up their power supply line, but this year "thin is in." The ATX spec for power supplies is 140mm of depth, but modern power supplies routinely exceed that, usually hitting at least 180mm or longer. While there was a 1.35kW power supply on display, the more impressive units were the Strider Gold Evolution units that deliver 650 watts or better and maintain modular cabling connectivity while being just 140mm deep. SilverStone also now includes the Air Penetrator fan in their Strider Gold Evolution power supplies, reducing fan noise and improving cooling.


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Patriot also has some portable storage solutions and media players on display. Their concept of the portable cloud storage is basically an external USB 3.0 + WiFi enabled HDD/SSD enclosure with a built-in battery. Instead of transferring large media files onto your tablet or other portable device, you can store them on a device like the Gauntlet 2. It supports HDDs and SSDs and should last upwards of five hours while streaming content over wireless (and potentially longer with an SSD). Probably the most likely use case is for those who want to take a large media library with them on a trip and they lack the storage capacity to hold it all on their tablet/smartphone (though it works with other OSes as well). So you could stash your Gauntlet 2 in the overhead compartment and still watch all of your media library while seated on a plane.
The other additions are the PBO Alpine and Core XT media streamers. (PBO stood for Patriot Box Office originally, though now it’s just the PBO brand.) The Alpine side is Android based, with the current Alpine using an ARM926EJ-S SoC (500MHz, 128MB DDR2, 256MB NAND); the Core XT side uses a Linux based interface with a larger form factor and a Realtek 1186 SoC (750MHz). The Alpine is intended primarily as a media streamer with support for up to 1080p playback with no internal storage, but it does support USB storage; availability is expected in the March time frame with a price of $89. The Core XT has an internal 3.5” drive tray capable of supporting up to 4TB drives. It also has USB 3.0, Ethernet, and WiFi connectivity and again supports up to 1080p video. Availability is also expected around March, with pricing TBD (based on configuration).
Gallery: Patriot’s Portable Cloud Storage and Media Streamers





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The SSD market is continuing to grow and we're seeing no slowdown in the number of players trying to get in on the action. Mushkin, one of the first companies I ever worked with, just showed me their new lineup of SandForce SF-2281 SSDs.

First up is the 1.8" Chronos Go, available with both Toggle and standard Toshiba NAND. Capacities go all the way up to 480GB.

Next is the Atlas mSATA SSD. Once again available with both Toggle mode and standard Toshiba NAND (24nm in the photo above). Capacities here top out at 240GB. SSD vendors are particularly excited about mSATA with Ultrabooks and other notebooks looking to implement smaller-than-2.5" SSD form factors.
Both of these lines will be available in Q1.

Finally we have Mushkin's Scorpion PCIe SSD. Based on a Marvell PCIe RAID controller, Mushkin's prototype features four custom removable SATA SSDs (they look like MBA SSDs but they aren't electrically compatible). Availability will be sometime in Q2.



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Patriot has been supplying memory products for some time now, and they had the usual assortment of SSDs, RAM, USB, and other Flash products on display in their suite. We’ve tested many of their SSDs already—or at least similar products with the same controller—and besides the numerous SandForce equipped SSDs they also had an SSD with a Phison controller. The Phison-based products will constitute the Magma line, with 64/128/256GB capacities available and SATA 6Gbps support. We’ll be interested in testing their Magma solutions and seeing how the controller competes with other solutions; Patriot’s goal is to deliver performance that’s competitive with other midrange SSD solutions, with the intention of delivering such SSDs at more affordable price points. With a new controller and firmware to develop and debug (relative to existing solutions), the launch target is currently Q2’2012.
Patriot also had a couple SNB-E systems running to demonstrate large memory applications. With quad-channel memory and eight DIMM slots, Patriot had two systems available, one with 32GB (8x4GB) and one with 64GB (8x8GB). This is obviously a solution targeted more at workstation users, and as a demo of what sort of work would require that much system RAM Patriot had a Photoshop plug-in that stitched together 90 500-600MB TIF images into a single huge panoramic video. The final output of the tool is a 26Kx9K 1.80GB image, and the amount of system RAM has a dramatic impact on performance. The project loads in around 21 seconds with 16GB, 32GB, or 64GB of RAM (largely bottlenecked by the SSD storage performance), but it requires over twice as long (54 seconds) with 8GB RAM. The entire process takes under one minute with 64GB, just under 3 minutes with 32GB RAM, 6.5 minutes with 16GB RAM, and 8.5 minutes with 8GB RAM.
Gallery: Patriot SSDs, Flash, and Large Memory Applications





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Mozilla announced today that it would be offering a so-called Extended Support Release (or ESR) for Firefox to ease the pain of enterprises, universities, and other users put off by the company's earlier decision to switch to a rapid release cycle for Firefox. The ESR will be updated to a new major version about once a year, and then maintained with security patches until the next ESR, much as Firefox 3.6 has been maintained since Firefox 4's release. The first ESR should be Firefox 10, which is due on January 31 - six weeks after the stable release of Firefox 9.
The plan as currently proposed is to support each ESR for nine Firefox release cycles, which at the current rate of a new release every six weeks ends up being about 54 weeks. For each major release of Firefox, the ESR build will receive a batch of security updates and bugfixes (so, FIrefox 11 would bring Firefox 10.01, Firefox 14 would bring Firefox 10.04, and etc.) without making changes to the rendering engine or major features - extensions that break in major version updates should also continue working in the ESR when it is updated. As each new ESR is introduced, the previous ESR will receive 6-12 more weeks of official support before being discontinued.
The ESR proposal was created by Mozilla's Enterprise User Working Group, and will hopefully be the first step toward remedying Firefox's historically poor enterprise support - Internet Explorer and Chrome both offer MSI installers and Group Policy controls for use by Active Directory administrators who need to keep their users' browsers locked down and up-to-date.
Source: Mozilla



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Gigabyte had five of its upcoming 7-series motherboards on display at CES today. While Gigabyte isn't talking about all of the features that will be available at launch, we will see an mSATA connector on some boards (GA-Z77X-UD3H) for use with smaller SSDs as a NAND cache in front of a hard drive. Gigabyte also showcased its G1.Sniper M3, a high-end micro-ATX motherboard. As Ivy Bridge brings down max TDPs at the high end, this may finally be the beginning of a transition to smaller desktops - even in the enthusiast space. The transition doesn't have to be huge, but perhaps it's time for some more innovation in the desktop space when it comes to form factors.
None of these boards support Thunderbolt however we may see some Thunderbolt enabled designs after the 7-series chipset launch in early Q2 (early April sounds about right).
Gallery: Gigabyte's 7-Series Ivy Bridge Motherboards at CES




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Zalman's lineup at this year's CES was more evolutionary than revolutionary, and unfortunately some of the more interesting products (Zalman-branded SSDs and video cards) aren't yet bound for U.S. shores. That latter one is a shame, too, since Zalman produces some excellent aftermarket cooling for GPUs.

What we do have are evolutions of Zalman's existing lineup of CPU coolers. The CNPS series gets a series of small upgrades. The old flower-style Zalman HSF unit now has a more rigid circular design and a pair of heatpipes that circle the bottoms of the copper films; this is the CNPS8900. The tower-style CNPS11X sees a slight shift in design, and the "floating fan" CNPS9900MAX now has a very beefy big brother that holds three fans, one each in both floating sets of fins, and one in the middle.

The line of power supplies Zalman had on display was unfortunately less than exciting. Their budget power supplies had no 80 Plus certification to speak of, while the more upscale line was just 80 Plus standard. Not particularly exciting and certainly not moving things forward.
Thankfully, cases were a little more interesting though again they feel like a small race to the bottom. I remember when the phrase "Zalman case" meant a giant fanless radiator you could put a computer inside. Some of the cases were more glitzy than others, but one model had an integrated LED temperature display, and another featured front-loading hot-swappable drive bays. All featured aggressive blue LED lighting.

Finally, the most bizarre but amusing product available was an anti-viral mouse. It's a USB mouse that has anti-viral software on board, running at all times. Strange to be sure, but curious enough to warrant more investigation at a later date.



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While we won't see final hardware for a couple of months, EVGA is teasing its entry into the power supply market with a 1500W sample of its upcoming NEX PSU. The NEX lineup will also include 650W, 750W and 1000W models.
EVGA is being purposefully quiet about the NEX's featureset other than to say that it'll feature an innovative new cable design, "configurable" +12V rails and an easy to use dummy mode for dual-PSU systems.
A number of PC component companies have entered the PSU business as it generally comes with decent margins and it's a good way of building up additional revenue. The question is, how will EVGA differentiate in a crowded market? You could argue that it has a lot of experience with that sort of problem given that its primary business involves selling video cards. There are simply a lot of unknowns at this point.
Gallery: EVGA Plans to Enter the PSU Market with the NEX PSU




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A couple of days earlier than originally expected, ASUS pushed out an update to its Transformer Prime bringing the tablet up to Android 4.0.3 (Ice Cream Sandwich). I brought my Prime with me to Vegas just to be ready for when this update went live. I installed the update last night and have played with the platform a bit since then. Tegra 3 definitely does a better job of handling the ICS UI compared to OMAP 4 in the Galaxy Nexus (more on this in our review tomorrow). In particular, bringing up the task switcher on the Prime is much smoother than it is on the Galaxy Nexus.
ASUS kept the quick settings menu in the lower right as well as the CPU governor settings we loved from our original review.
JavaScript performance actually appears to have taken a step back compared to Honeycomb on the Prime. I&#39;m no longer able to get < 1700ms scores with ICS installed (even in the Normal power profile, SunSpider 0.9.1 is up at 2253ms now). I&#39;ll be digging into browser performance over the coming days to see if I can find out what changed between Honeycomb and ICS on the Prime.
I&#39;m very pleased to see such a quick turnaround on the TF Prime ICS port. If we can get similar progress on Tegra 2 based tablets I&#39;ll be very happy.
Gallery: Transformer Prime Gets 4.0.3 (ICS) Update




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We spent some time with Acer this afternoon looking at their upcoming products and we were able to get some hands-on time with many laptops and tablets. We&rsquo;ll save the tablets for a separate article&mdash;and the most interesting tablets aren&rsquo;t something we can discuss right now anyway&mdash;so let&rsquo;s talk Acer laptops for a moment. First, the best news is that all the laptops we saw have ditched the floating island keyboard and most are using a typical chiclet design. We&rsquo;re still not sure about the merged Enter/Backslash keys (most likely a design element for a European or Asian model), but otherwise the keyboards have a good feel and are far more usable than some older designs. Most of the laptops are updated versions of existing product lines, so we won&rsquo;t focus too much on those. The most interesting laptop on display was their ultrabook S5, a follow up to the S3 we reviewed last month.
The new S5 ultrabook builds on some of the strengths of the S3, with a few interesting twists. It&rsquo;s thinner than the S3 for one, and it&rsquo;s also getting the Ivy Bridge treatment. Along with Ivy Bridge, the S5 also has a Thunderbolt port&mdash;one of several Windows laptops we&rsquo;ve seen at CES with Thunderbolt. Where things get a little odd is with the ports on the S5. On the S3, they&rsquo;re at the back of the laptop chassis, which wasn&rsquo;t really a problem in our book. With the S5, they&rsquo;re still on the back, but they&rsquo;re hidden by default with a motorized plate that extends down about a centimeter at the press of a button. Okay, sure, it&rsquo;s kind of entertaining the first few times you see it, but I can&rsquo;t help but have serious concerns about the longevity of such a solution. Moving parts are always more likely to break, and hiding the ports behind a motorized latch just feels completely unnecessary. The LCD and overall build quality are also generally unchanged from the S3, so while the S5 isn&rsquo;t ugly by any means, it still feels like a cheaper ultrabook with seems all around the edges.
Acer mentioned that they&rsquo;re working to elevate the quality of the Acer brand, with the Gateway brand now taking over more of the value market, and that&rsquo;s a good plan. They&rsquo;ve made strides the last couple of years with the use of better materials and overall better designs. However, there&rsquo;s still a rather sizeable gap between the build quality of an Aspire S3/S5 and something like a MacBook Air or ASUS UX31E. We also have concerns when things like the CPU throttling issue on the TimelineX 3830TG went unnoticed during validation and testing. If Acer wants to compete in the higher price arenas, they still have plenty of work to do in improving their build quality, designs, and quality assurance. Hopefully we&rsquo;ll see more improvements over the coming year (like the farewell to the floating island keyboards), and we&rsquo;re still waiting for a major OEM to really push for high quality displays in all of their laptops. Acer&rsquo;s tablets appear to be making real strides in those areas, and we had some time to handle some unannounced tablets, so Acer just needs to apply some of those same lessons to their laptops.
Gallery: Acer’s Upcoming Laptops: S5 Ultrabook with IVB, TB, and a Motor





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