Corsair had on display a lot of the usual stuff that we are all already familiar with, but it did have some new additions.

It will be selling a new DDR4 3400 kit that is a limited release via its web store, as it has done with a lot of other limited run high bin RAM sets before.  There was a Carbide 100R Silent case that looks great for those who are needing a quiet case and want to spend their money wisely, as for the features the price of $59 is a really good one.  There was also the new H110i GT liquid cooler for a CPU and a HG10 N780 Edition GPU cooling bracket in display systems showing off just how good the cooling performance was.  The HG10 looks like an ideal situation for the Nvidia GTX 770, 780, 780 Ti, Titan, and Titan Black owners who want a way to cool their cards more efficiently.

Stay tuned as we will have more on what we think about what we saw at Corsair in the coming days.

THe Carbide 100R Silent mid-tower PC chassis looks to be a real winner at the $59 price point given by Corsair

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Enthusiasts are on a never ending quest to find better cooling for their CPUs.  Air cooling is the norm these days, but affordable water cooling systems are becoming more affordable.  Water cooling is the next step and can provide great cooling effectiveness.  There are two ways to install a water cooling system into a computer. They are piecing together a system from individual parts, or a “closed-loop” system.  Closed loop water cooler contains the block, pump, and radiator in a sealed loop (that usually require no maintenance).  Many companies are now coming out with their own closed loop systems for enthusiasts.

Today we will look at Thermaltake’s Water 3.0 Extreme closed loop cooler and see how it preforms.  The cooler is Thermaltake’s top end closed loop system, and has a 240mm radiator.  The pump for the system is built into the water block, which can mount to multiple AMD and Intel sockets.

After seeing the pictures you will probably be thinking “I have seen this kit before”, indeed you have if you have looked into AIO water cooling kits.  Asetek is the ODM for this and many other kits and some would argue that the company has a monopoly on the AIO water cooling hardware industry.  Recently, Asetek has caused a stir in being granted another liquid cooling patent by the USPTO which may ultimately hurt consumers. Unfortunately for consumers, Asetek’s aggressive patenting and litigation hurts consumers’ ability to have choice as most kits are now Asetek based.

The kit has many variations through the various companies who sell variants of it, usually with their own fans, features, and packaging.  Many will be buying the kit for those options weighted heavily on price.  With this kit just under the $100 mark it is a definite contender for your case

Everything was well packaged and secured within the box

Mount kits for multiple sockets of Intel and AMD are included; once again it was well packaged and organized

2 PWM Fans are included with the kit. I am told that these were specifically chosen for the kit and that replacing the fans with higher speed models won’t make a big difference.

The instructions that came with the system are very easy to read and understand I do suggest that you get the latest fan control app from the Thermaltake global website, so you can be up to date.

Everything was intact with no blemishes on the system.  There is a USB cable that attaches to a USB2.0 internal header, if you want to use the fan control app with it.

The base is clean with a very flat surface, though not a mirror surface as it still had some machining visible.  Pre-applied TIM is provided on the base, though many (like me) will clean it off and use some fresh product of choice.

Installation is very straightforward and easy to do; the instructions are clear and nicely drawn out.  The Intel mount which I used was easily installed within a couple of minutes.  The 120mm fans plug into the CPU block/pump combo, which itself plugs into an internal USB 2.0 header as well as CPU fan pin-out on the motherboard.  It can then be automatically controlled via the desktop application via the USB. I suggest that if you want to use the included app to regulate your fans, set CPU fan to 100% in bios (or a curve forcing that) with fan failure alarm set.

Tt Water Software

The application for the water cooling system is very easy to use and allows you to run different profiles.  Silent, Extreme, and Custom which is best for running your own fan profile.  I learned that modifying the Silent or Extreme profiles didn’t seem to work as well as setting up custom profile.  Swapping from one profile to another doesn’t have a fast response and sometimes requires fiddling with multiple times to get it to switch. There are Notification options for the coolant temperature and Fan speed, which are good safety measures.  The main thing you get from the app over just plugging fans into headers on the motherboard are viewing coolant temperature, notifications, and fan profiles based on  CPU temps (if you have the pump plugged into the CPU header).

I stress tested my Intel Core i7 4790K Devil’s Canyon ES at 4.7GHz using OCCT against the Cooler Master TPC-812 (their highest end air cooler) and then again with this Water 3.0 Extreme.  I let it run for about 8 hours and over the times when I checked it I was getting readings that were about an average  8C cooler overall.  The sound level at full speed is very reasonable, and thankfully not too distracting.

Overall I would recommend this kit based on its ease of installation, performance, and cost.  I think that the price point is good for a dual 120mm Asetek ODM all-in-one cooler as other of the same type can go for up to $30 more.  The performance is definitely there, holding the 4790K ES solidly @ 4.7GHz while being stressed 100 %.  The only real issue that I saw with this kit was the control app can be a bit buggy, although works well aside from that.

Thermaltake Water 3.0 Extreme retails for $99.99 on Amazon.com right now.

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Is this the most overclockable CPU die AMD manufactured yet?

AMD decided that the time has come to regain the crown in overclocking, and the company means it. You can thank all of this to several key members of former ATI Technologies, now AMD GPG. I know it is not fair to name the few, since I can’t mention them all, but guys such as Godfrey Cheng, Ian McNaughton, Korhan Eben, Macci, and many unsung heroes combined with old-school AMD executives such as Patrick Moorhead, who keeps his desktop machines OC’ed to 3.2 GHz and arguing with IT Police… All in all, this effort brought a lot of fighting spirit to AMD and these guys are now biting at all sides. First with Radeon series, then with chipsets and now with CPUs.
Phenom II is going to be extremely overclockable. How overclockable? Much.
With good air-cooler, 4.0 GHz is a given on almost every Black Edition CPU that will hit the stores starting January 8, 2009. This is nothing special, since Intel can do the same with Core i7 series. But, with water-cooling or TEC-enhanced water-cooling (hint: CoolIT), you can easily reach 4.5 GHz and beyond.
But, the real show starts when we dip below the zero degrees Celsius/Centigrade. History of AMD and sub-zero cooling is quite interesting. AMD was the first manufacturer to showcase vapor chamber and liquid oxygen cooling (yes, oxygen, not nitrogen) with Athlon 550 MHz that reached 1.03 GHz and became the first CPU to pass the 1 GHz mark. As the time went by, AMD slowly started to move away from Swashbuckler attitude lead by Jerry Sanders and put a dull corporate Motorola face lead by Hector Jesus Ruiz. All of this is past now, since AMD put substantial effort to produce a CPU which operating temperature is massive 300 degrees Celsius!
Yes, you’ve read it correctly – from -200 to +100, you can be certain that your Phenom will not fail. On-die sensors are tweaked up and they will not lock the part at -100 or -20C, and you can use dry ice or LN2 to crank it up to the max.

The max reached so far by AMD team is… 6.0 GHz! Given that most LN2 clockers use dual-core CPUs to reach 5.5+ GHz speeds, seeing 6.0 GHz CPU running applications such as Crysis is a testament to monumental effort put by AMD’s CPU and Chipset team. Don’t think this was CPU team only effort – guys from Markham worked hard on Advanced Clock Calibration, or ACC. ACC is exactly “the secret sauce” AMD needed to unlock these levels of performance.
Hitting 4.0 GHz on air, 4.5 on water, 4.5+ on TEC+water, 5.6 GHz on dry ice and there was a post at 6.0 GHz. Given the fact that dry ice is “weaker” solution than LN2, it will be really interesting to see what will happen when hard-core overclockers get their hands on these 45nm ice-cold babies.
AMD is back. And yes, Intel’s Core i7 thunder has just been stolen completely. Core i7 is a great CPU, but quite expensive platform, with three channels of DDR3. AMD Phenom II comes out with 16 GB/s of memory bandwidth using only two channels, and clocking like there’s no tomorrow.
The best part of them all is the price: AMD Phenom II 940 Black Edition will set you back for 40% of the amount you have to shell out for Core i7 Extreme 965 and yet, it comes with a radically cheaper platform of equal or even better overclocking capabilities.

UPDATE Nov 22, 2008, 08:09AM: Journalists that visited AMD Austin HQ were confined by Non-Disclosure Agreement, and after first news of hitting 6 GHz, websites started to change the story. However, according to our sources, AMD hit more than 6.0 GHz clock, and this was confirmed by CRN magazine in UK, who did not adhere to NDA and published a clock speed of 6.3 GHz. So, there you go – 45nm Phenom using Silicon-Germanium SOI wafers hit 6.3 GHz, higher than Intel was able to hit with Core i7 and its 45nm High-K Hafnium wafers (for now).

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Finally, single-slot cooling for Radeon 4870.

Package-wise, Power Color placed both low-flow and high-flow fittings (3/8″, 1/2″), while the retail price is set at 369 dollars.
Some manufacturers from both ATI and Nvidia world like to just remove the air cooler and slap the water cooling one, without replacing the bracket of the card – effectivelly leaving their owners with a dual-slot product. TUL didn’t made such a mistake and the board is proudly single-slot one. Meaning you could put six of them in one of upcoming X58-based motherboards, for ultimate Flight Simulator or Folding@home experience.
Then again, you just might want to have one silent computer

P.S. Guys, why the new card has only 512MB? Why not 1GB model, you could sell it for 30 USD more, and nobody would care…

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You can expect that the new product will also be price-friendly, and hopefully, one day water-cooling will be mainstream. There is nothing better than putting a Noctua 120mm fan on Freezone Elite and enjoying looking at AMD Phenom 9950 at 3.4 GHz, with CPU temperature around 27degC. In the world of Intel, I managed to put Core 2 Extreme QX6800 to 3.33 GHz, with a temperature idling at 37C, and 49C under full load.

So far, I haven’t been able to learn about the release date for the parts, but my guess is during next few weeks, in order to make it into Christmas shopping lists. Hopefully, this new product will offer same performance and a really good price

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The motherboard for the ultimate workstation

The board supports both SLI and CrossFire in their respective maximum configurations (3 or 4 GPUs), but what makes this board really interesting is the fact that you could connect 12 LCD displays on it, or create a GPGPU/rendering/scientific/folding farm in a single case. Putting six ATI Radeon 4850 graphics cards would enable roughly 6TFLOPS of computing power. In case of Nvidia, you would have to pick up GeForce 9800GT (Palit has single-slot 1GB card) and have less theoretical computing power, but in terms of folding, you would be looking at 30-35.000 PPD system (at a cost of two GTX260 cards).
This is really impressive engineering feat from ASUS, with the only disappointment being usage of RealTek GbE controller. For a workstation motherboard, I would much happier if Marvell was on-board.
Storage-wise, you can install no less than eight SATA devices and not a single IDE device, since ASUS stayed in “Revolution” theme and killed of the PATA connector. Also, I found that a shared PS/2 port was also pretty neat solution, even though real revolution would be killing both PS/2 slots. This way, you still have one legacy part: PS/2.

There is one shared PS/2 port, for either keyboard or a mouse

Funny part of this story is that if anybody would have a time machine and go back to IBM engineers in 1986-7 frame and told them that only remain of their failed standard is going to be a keyboard/mouse connector, and that PS/2 connector will outlive PATA, I guess they would call you… crazy? Lunatic? Infidel?

P.S. If you’re wondering… yes, the answer is true. There are no technical issues that would prevent you from installing 3-Way SLI and 4-Way CrossFireX setup, consisting out of three GTX280 and two 4870X2 cards. Only problem is that you would have to have a watercooling setup, since you are limited to single-slot cooling solutions. I guess Asetek, CoolIT or somebody similar could come up with a solution for this “problem”.

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FTW series is proving to be quite a success...

Under a current plan, every product is slowly being upgraded to an own design, enabling higher overclocking margins and making sure that future of Superclocked, SSC, FTW and Black Pearl parts is safe.
During our visit in EVGA’s European HQ, we learned that custom design GTX series is also coming to market. All in all, things are getting interesting. Sadly for EVGA’s motherboard team, Nvidia will not make chipset for upcoming Core i7 processors using LGA-1366 socket, but who knows, we just might see X58 chipset with two nForce 200 chips on it.
Company has rather aggressive plans for 2009, and it will be interesting to see how will their alternative business lines will develop (dual LCD display, DisplayLink adapters, TV tuners, waterblocks).

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