Up to 7 PCI-E x16 slots on one card OCZ PCI Express SSD Innovative casing from Corsair and TT 80 Plus Gold from OCZ ASRock puts CrossFire on nForce!

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Up to 7 PCI-E x16 slots on one card   Posted on 05/03/2009 at 17:25 by Marc

	At CeBIT ASUSTek and ASRock are showing motherboards that are well furnished in PCI Express ports. The P6T7 WS Supercomputer has no less than 7 PCI-E x16 ports (as against 6 on the current P6T6), three of which support x16/x8, three just x8 and one x16. To get this number of ports, ASUSTeK has coupled the X58 chipset designed for the Core i7 processors with two nForce 200 chips. The number of ports on the ASRock is less impressive: 4, each with 8 lanes when they are used. In contast to the ASUSTeK however, where only one of the slots (the last) can be used for a double slot card, all four ports on the ASRock X58 Supercomputer can be. Of course these cards have not been designed for any forthcoming hepta-SLI but rather for massively parallel processing using an AMD Firestream or NVIDIA Tesla.

OCZ PCI Express SSD   Posted on 05/03/2009 at 17:12 by Marc

	Very active on the SSD market, OCZ is currently working on a PCI Express SSD, the Z Drive. With a 1 TB capacity, combining 4 256 GB MLC SSDs in RAID, it has read speeds of 600 MB/s and write speeds of 500 MB/s. It has a 256 MB cache but we don’t know if this 4x64 MB (64 MB per SSD) or a cache that is situated at the level of the controller to manage the RAID and PCI Express interface. Still at prototype stage, the availability and price of the Z-Drive are unknown…

Innovative casing from Corsair and TT   Posted on 05/03/2009 at 17:01 by Marc

	At CeBIT, Corsair and Thermaltake have shown prototypes of some innovative new casing. This is Corsair’s first venture into this domain and their tower shows they have taken on some good ideas such as separation of chambers, a hot-swap hard drive bay, access to the back of the motherboard for mounting/dismounting the cooling system without removing the card from the the casing and plenty of space for power supply cables. Thermaltek has gone even further with the Level 10, that will only officially be unveiled at Computex in June. It has veritable chambers designed for each part of the PC, a first!

80 Plus Gold from OCZ   Posted on 05/03/2009 at 16:40 by Marc

	OCZ has announced that it will be the first to retail an 80 Plus Gold PSU. PSUs that have an 80 plus certification of 87%, 90% and 87% at 20%, 50% and 100% of rated load were up till recently only available on the pro market, the first being a Dell PSU last June. The Z1000 supplies 1000w (996w of which is delivered to the 12v alone) and OCZ has even announced a 93% efficiency in average load. We’re yet to hear how much it will go for…

ASRock puts CrossFire on nForce!   Posted on 05/03/2009 at 16:32 by Marc

	CrossFire on the nForce motherboard? At CeBIT ASRock has shown that it’s not impossible, with the N7AD-SLI, that with a bios update, enables support for both SLI and CrossFire, a first for a 775 socket motherboard! It remains to be seen if there is an official agreement with AMD: if this is the case, then we can expect there to be more of this type of offer, but if not, AMD will probably block this product.