Introduction

We already published some of our travels concerning CES a few days ago and hopefully, you also had a chance to check out the keynote last week too. To supplement our coverage, we put together our notes and took some time to reflect and build inferences on what we saw at the show. CES gives us a great opportunity to take everything working together, and not just a single slice of technology to which we are accustomed in standalone product reviews. A perfect example of this was when we walked through a particular booth to see a ViewSonic 20" LCD running on a next generation Shuttle SFF XPC, which is running Microsoft's MCE 2005 over a Belkin 802.11 Pre-N hotspot. Just merely mentioning those terms a few years ago would have given you a custom-fitted straight jacket, but here we are today, running them all interpolating together in a booth that imports LED lights from China, of all things.

Unfortunately, I did not have the opportunity to bump into Larry Page, like Anand, or Bill Gates, like Wesley, so the highlight of my trip to Vegas this year was getting to ride the monorail around Wynn's new billion dollar hotel.

On a completely unrelated note, we have some awesome coverage of Silicon Image's suite, which we will be following up in a separate article. So for those of you who are as excited about HDMI as I am, stay tuned for the article!

Case and Cooling

There was a new emphasis on case and cooling during the show, although not in the traditional means. Anand mentioned MGE's desire for a high end small form factor HTPC case and our talks with Zalman, ASUS, CoolerMaster and ThermalTake also conveyed the same vision. All manufacturers seemed to indicate that Cebit 2005 will be the show that they launch their big products (particularly Zalman), but in the meantime, we had some tidbits from ThermalTake and CoolerMaster to share.

ThermalTake

Although there were not any finished products on the show floor, we got word from ThermalTake that they will be unveiling their case designed for water cooling within the next few weeks. Mount holes, reservoir and piping are all designed into the case itself, which looked very similar to a next generation Xaser design. We will get more details, and of course, a full blown review in the next couple of weeks.

ASUS

ASUS announced to us that they had spent the better part of a year working on their own next generation case based on nothing that we had ever seen before - the Vento. The case in the suite was just a prototype, but we did get a few pictures snapped in the meantime.

The front bezel has a hydraulic-like lift that brings the cover over the top. Unfortunately, lifts were not entirely perfected in time for the show. From the side view, you can also see Vento's extremely large cooling solution, which reminds us slightly of some cooler products that CoolerMaster worked on a year or so ago. We look forward to more progress on this one in the upcoming weeks.

CoolerMaster

CoolerMaster's clean and elegant case design laurels extend into their next generation HTPC case lineup. In future case designs, CoolerMaster will consolidate their case line-up into only four lines with various design variances per release. Servers will continue to use the "Stacker" design for servers and high end workstations, Praetorian and Centurion will continue to function as the desktop solution and CMedia models will act as the HTPC replacement for the ATCS and Cavalier line-up.

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We also had the chance to take a snapshot of the prototype CMedia design below.

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Obviously, the huge design win here is the backlit LCD dot matrix display. Corsair also unveiled their plans for an LCD interface on their "Expert" DIMM models, but arguably, CoolerMaster has the advantage of putting this display on the front panel rather than inside the case.

While talking to our friends at Logisys during the show, we also caught wind that they will be working on a full 5.25" LCD display to integrate in one or two bays of any case. The influx of Rheobuses and coolers over the last few years has proven that the function of chassis now extends beyond merely housing components. As one engineer described to us on the floor, the goal of next generation cases is to provide a full functional life support system for the PC and not just a lump of steel protecting the CPU from damage.

Storage

Hitachi and SanDisk stole the show as far as next generation storage devices go – bigger capacity, smaller platters and faster transfers. Hitachi unveiled their 0.8” diameter hard drives capable of 10GB of storage while SanDisk demonstrated their 8GB compact flash cards specifically designed for cameras and MP3 players. Ritek also demonstrated CF cards based on 8GB designs in their booth.

Transcend gave us the opportunity to look at their newest flash devices – 1.8” 20GB microdrive devices that sell for $120, about the same price as the average 1GB compact flash card. Micro drives sacrifice speed for write density, but for MP3 and other portable media devices, they do not require relatively fast IO speeds. Transcend will also release a 40GB version of the same 1.8” drive within the next few weeks.

Optical Media

Ritek and Imation both had a very large presence on the show floor this year. The Taiwanese and Japanese disc manufacturers were both pleased to announce 8X DVD+R Dual Layer discs. Although, good luck finding any burners that will actually write that strategy. New drives like the Plextor 716A are capable of writing 6X write descriptors on high quality 4X media, but we will have to wait until the next generation burners for true 8X DVD dual layer burns, since the lasers and pickups themselves will need refinements to support higher speed on dual layer.

Of course, if you hadn’t heard it from us before, let us be the first to tell you that 16X will definitely be the fastest single layer write speed possible. As media and drive manufacturers already start setting their eyes on BluRay and HD-DVDR, DVDR will only continue advancements in dual layer capability. Keep in mind that the physical limitation on hard drive read speed is what keeps DVD burners from writing faster than 16X – it’s going to take SATA-II or some other technology to keep up high sustainable IO transfers to redefine optical storage writes (and by that time, we expect to all be burning FVD’s, right?).

LightScribe

HP started their LightScribe commercials to coincide with the show this year, and we were very anxious to start seeing some samples after months of waiting. However, Lightscribe manufacturers and OEM partners were quick to note a few things to us before we able to get too excited. First of all, LightScribe is incredibly slow – it takes more than 5 minutes to burn a single layer DVDR, and then another 10+ minutes to burn the label onto the other side of the disc. The whole process effectively triples the total burn time of the laser during a typical burn – and in the same stride, reduces the average life of the laser by 66%. When we get samples later this month, we will have the full breakdown on LightScribe, but theoretically on paper, the technology already has some pitfalls in our opinion.

Companies like Primera were happy to show us their linear and thermal printing devices in the Ritek booth on the show floor. Although more geared for high volume duplicators, Primera’s photo quality replication was certainly impressive, and it will only be time before Primera or one of their competitors reduces the size of a radial printer and incorporates that into a DVD burner.

Prolink

There was a renowned emphasis on displays at the show - as Anand highlighted with his DLP primer coverage. However, away from the show floors and prying eyes of us mere mortals, there were several demos that made us very excited. Prolink showed us our first look at 6600 non-GT SLI in action. PixelView's engineers were able to snap us a couple of pictures of the demo below.

Looking closely, you can see that the 6600 non-GT solution still employs a bridge over the top portion of the card, which means 6600 SLI will still require slightly different video cards than the cards sitting on the shelf today. However, Prolink tells us that the 6600 SLI approach requires relatively little tweaking on the manufacturer's end. It may be possible for softmod BIOS upgrades on existing 6600 cards today that would allow SLI-like performance, although without the bridge PCB, the cards would suffer a decent performance hit.

The specifications for the FutureMark test are as listed below:

ASUS A8N-SLI
Athlon 64 3200+
256MB PC-3200
PixelView dual 6600 256MB (clocked at 340/650)

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The same configuration using the cards are their default clock of 300/500 scored 8255. Two stock 6600GT video cards yielded a little less than 12000 marks. So, the 1/3 difference in performance is significant, but if Prolink can pull the price point by 1/3 less than that of the GT variants, they will find themselves at a very interesting price point with very little competition. Who else wants an SLI configuration for less than $250?

Prolink is just another one of NVIDIA's partners that continues to layer additional but mildly unsupported features on NVIDIA hardware. You may recall that MSI, Epox and DFI all have produced motherboard variants that enabled "SLI"-like capability on nForce4 Ultra motherboards; some have reportedly achieved this using identical PCB between their nForce4 Ultra and SLI motherboards. Unfortunately, Prolink and these other companies are running a very strong risk of losing support in upcoming NVIDIA driver releases, as claimed by MSI after they halted production of their "DBS" motherboard based on the nForce4 Ultra chipset.

Across the street from the convention center, S3 gave us the opportunity to view their next generation video card lineup - which actually targets more of the low end set top box market than the PC market. In particular, S3's DeltraChrome S8 ULP processor caught our attention as it was running without a heatsink or fan using only 2.5W while running FutureMark. The S8 isn't the fastest GPU in the market, but it doesn't have to be if S3 is aiming for the set top box market - they are aiming for the low hanging HTPC market.

XGI has remained very quiet over the last few months, but they gave us a one-on-one opportunity to look over the upcoming product lineup. The recent shuffle inside the company has made them relook their target market. The company will not focus on competitors like S3 and the low end market. Rather, they will be re-introducing themselves to the retail market with their own video card lineup. Part of the problems that plagued XGI with the Volari line-up was the unwillingness for Tier 1 manufacturers to adopt the chipsets in their video cards.

Recently, however, XGI did aquire Dell as one of their OEM clients for the server markets with the low power, no nonsense Volari Z7 processor. Product managers also mentioned unofficially that they will roll out a plan for OSS Linux drivers for their products. This is great news for both Linux users and XGI alike as NVIDIA could use some strong driver competition.

PowerColor and Sapphire both showed a strong offering on and off the floor this year too. As Anand mentioned earlier, X850 is really shaping up to be the next X800XT PE - low stock, low availability and the likelihood that anyone will be able to afford these cards is turning out to be quite a pipe dream. Furthermore, the fact that the X800 Pro PCIe edition is already approaching EOL has dampened our spirits a little as well. However, the X800 XL is shaping up to be an exceptionally capable replacement. It's still going to be another month before we see retail availability.

Closing Thoughts

For many of us, CES doesn't give us any really juicy details in small dosages. The show floor is usually crammed with products that we already saw on roadmaps three months ago.

CES Predictions in '05: Media Center

CES was all about media "integrated" devices - TVs, set top boxes, PCs - all running some form of Windows and all doing the same thing, but with different degrees of quality. The SBC demonstration during the Keynote on Tuesday showed us the power of a handheld phone previewing a clip of a broadcast before the MCE device was told to record a four stream IPTV feed remotely.

MCE has some competition. CyberLink and InterVideo were both very pleased to demonstrate their MCE clones; SageTV and BeyondTV had powerful presences on the floor; we even found a tiny booth running their next generation set top box on the Linux based MythTV. The non-MCE devices have some advantages over MCE including multiple tuners, transcoding abilities, commercial skip, etc. But, on the other hand, Microsoft's partnership announcement with TiVo, Comcast, SBC and content providers like Starz!, Viacom and MLB may be too overwhelming. After all, Content is King. CyberLink was probably the most prevalent media player on the floor outside of MCE as multiple partnerships announced that they would ship their devices with CyberLink's media center free, including CoolerMaster, Hauppauge and ASUS.

Whether or not Microsoft will come out on top of the MCE war is moot. The message is that multifunction, set top box replacements and improvements are here to stay and we are just seeing the tip of the iceberg as more companies start to embrace the idea. Case manufacturers are putting LCD displays on their units to interface better for media devices; Hauppage is putting multiple tuners on a single card; NVIDIA and ATI are integrating video optimizations on their hardware; and, motherboard manufacturers are creating ultra-small, ultra-cool PCs designed specifically for the HTPC market. No matter where we turned to on the floor, someone had something new to bring to the media center.

CES Predictions in '05: Phone

Like many others who have recently adopted VOIP solutions, I took a personal interest in investigating SIPs, Vonage and other VOIP solutions. Voice Over IP drew a very mixed crowd at the show. On one hand, Microsoft and SBC gave the demonstration during the keynote demonstrating "integrated" devices and phones transmitting data to MCE devices and set top boxes - but not on a WiFi network! On the other hand, you have the push from services like Vonage, Kiwi and Soyo that would love to see WiFi everywhere. Although it might have just been my personal opinion, it seems as though there is a large push to converge as many devices as possible, yet leave WiFi off voice devices that could use WiFi for VOIP. Palm and ASUS, for example, were happy to show us their newest GSM enabled devices that lack 802.11 capabilities. Vonage was very excited about debuting their VOIP WiFi phone, but the phone was nowhere near as polished as something that we would see from Motorola or Siemens. I would certainly embrace a GSM/WiFi hybrid phone that could switch between VOIP and GSM depending on my proximity to an 802.11 hotspot. Most likely, it will take a PC manufacturer and a VOIP provider like Vonage to spec out a product like that, and hopefully, we won't have to wait until CES 2006 to see it.

CES Predictions in '05: Graphics

Graphics were a big part of this show, for both the announced and "unannounced" hardware floating around the show. In particular, Prolink's 6600 non-GT SLI and the nForce4 Ultra-to-SLI hacks were the talk over late night dinners and closed room conversations, so we are really excited to see how some of these out-of-band technologies are accepted both by the consumers and NVIDIA - who have the power to pull the plug at any minute.

If I had to pin a single non-Microsoft related word to label this CES it would be "DLP". As Anand's coverage showed, digital light projection was everywhere on the show - you couldn't walk 5 feet without seeing a DLP TV or a poster to go see the DLP booths. Epson's 3-LCD display put on some very convincing demos representing the "rainbow" effect on DLP displays and how their 3-LCD technology combats that. But the fact is that none of the displays outside their booth used 3-LCD - and that was no accident. Whether 3-LCD or DLP are the better technologies, we did come away from the show with a few significant inferences. Primarily, LCOS seems very dead as Philips just announced their withdrawal from the technology as well. Plasma, of course, is also a dying ship that should have died a long time ago, but is now also on its way out. With the introduction of 7" deep, 1080p DLP TVs, we have to argue if LCD is really worth pursuing also. LCD TV has a long way to go to catch up with DLP TV, particularly in the cost race.

Fortunately, it looks like this is one of those years where we will really benefit as consumers, since there are so many competing technologies attempting to lower their price points on many different technologies. If we compare this to CES 5 or 6 years ago where we only had a few companies deciding the marketing direction for the entire industry, we can see that there have been some clear changes in how consumer electronics are marketed, designed and manufactured.

Now for a few weeks of rest - just in time for Spring IDF and Cebit!