CES 2014 Exhibition Roundup

Jan 22, 2014

Here’s a roundup of everything else we saw while touring the CES exhibition halls that we haven’t already posted about!

OWC had some thunderbolt SSDs on display:

Synology had their 2014 NAS’s on display which look exactly like the 2012 and 2013 models:

Their big news was really the release of a revamped GUI interface on the webadmin software. Didn’t seem like a big deal to me. They did however have a cool little miniNAS that could take 4 x 2.5″ drives. Kinda reminded me of the Gigabyte Brix+ NAS:

ioSafe were also nearby with their fireproof and waterproof NAS’s that take a Synology NAS and enclose it. Now that the NSA has shown a few reasons not to store your data on the cloud, then these seem very much more useful:

The one on the right is of course from fire testing:

The good news is that your drives don’t get hot even when in a fire. Magic!

Supertalent were showing off the latest version PCIE RAID SSD that is EFI compatible:

It also comes in 2TB sizes and will cost a *lot*. Also some regular SSDs:

And we saw steam boxes galore. Most of them are pretty uninteresting and just dumped a mITX board in a mITX case, but a few look decent and different. Zotac’s was just a revamp of their existing mITX solution:

There was a version in a Prodigy from webhallen:

Another version from Scan (UK):

Origin’s version was ugly:

A fractal node based version by next:

Alternate proved to be quite similar:

Materiel didn’t even bother to put their own logo on theirs:

ibuypower went with shiny white plastic:

Gigabyte just stuck a sticker on their tiny brix NUC style PC:

Falcon Northwest decided you probably wanted more airbrushing in your living room:

Digital Storm love dem Corsair products:

Cyberpower tried to do a squashed stormtrooper look and failed:

Alienware’s is not user servicable at all apparantly:

Are you bored of steamboxes yet? I certainly was.

Creative had a cool little battery powered (or mains powered) bluetooth speaker called the Roar that had a ton of options and use. It was also loud enough for a small room which was very impressive given it’s size. It didn’t feel or sound like some cheapo iphone speakers that your buddy thinks is adequate for a party. But then at $250 ish it isn’t cheap either. I would certainly use it though you know if Creative were to sent one over 😉

Slick minimal look from the front, lots of options including voice recording on the back:

Inwin were showing off their cool new 901 mITX case:

The cabling is all recessed in the back and hidden behind a removable plate so it can look tidy from any angle:

Specs:

It’s really quite sexy:

And you can side mount an optical drive in that little hole. This is somewhat simlar to the ATX version of the case but in the ATX version the ODD is actually recessed next to the power supply so that the tray ejects into the hole:

The ATX version has been out for a while but uses all the same ideas:

This is the removable plate that was missing on the earlier shot:

Supermicro, mainly known for the workstations and servers were also showing their new gaming rigs. This consisted of one single processor rig with a GPU and a 2P workstation with a Titan. Supermicro did say they were working on their overclocking and more gamer orientated features such as SLI and beefier VRMs, but the motherboards were still the usual ugly green. They were at least quiet unlike the real workstations they sell. You don’t want to be putting a window on these rigs:

Stieger Dynamics had their high end HTPC style gaming/workstation rigs on display, including one with dual firepro cards and a 12 core CPU:

Their cases are for sale seperately and retail for $650 which does include the LCD screen in the front. They are made of beefy aluminum though.

The only thing I didn’t like is just how hot the coolant will be running. The CPU and 2 GPUs are cooled by a thin 240 and a thin 120 radiator with only one set of fans which is a lot of power to dissipate: