Yes it’s hard to imagine but we are still working our way through all the CES stuff!
Lepa and Enermax are both under the Ecomaster parent company, so they shared a suite. For our water coolers one of the big things that might be of interest was a new fan called the twister which is optimized for noise and pressure:
It’s PWM which is great and the nice thing is an option to switch the PWM range from 500-1200 to 500-1500. There are no LEDs unlike their more famous “casino” style fans which gives for a classy but subtle look, and although there is sleeving it could be a bit denser weave. The other nice feature is that the actual fan blade unit is only held in place with magnets so it just pops off which makes cleaning dust off super easy. My only concern is that the flan blades are semi opaque. Any see through plastic tends to be a bit more brittle and less flexible and this can lead to higher noise, however at these lower fan speeds noise shouldn’t be an issue.
We also saw some of their AIO units which may or may not go on sale due to the Asetek patent trolls. The radiators are fairly thick, and the copper base uses a channel to create a better dispersion of the coolant much like the standard jetplate we see in a lot of water blocks. The narrow fin spacing might imply a fairly high restriction which when combined with a small low power pump may lead to suboptimal flow rates. We don’t expect this therefore to compete with custom water cooling, but it may be very competitive with existing AIOs if it comes to market.
There were also some CPU coolers with a full range of color options. Interestingly they all had the same cooling capability despite the differences in the (still) thermally efficient paint used. This is because the fan RPMs were tweaked on each to make the thermal performance the same. The first two are Enermax ones, and the rest are Lepa:
There were also a bunch of cases on display. This group were economy midrange ATX air cooler cases called the LPC308:
While the LPC309 looked a bit cooler and had top mount usb/headphones/mic sockets.
Interestingly there is a water cooling case coming called the Thermax Giant:
It supports a thin 360 up top and a thin 240 at the bottom. We of course tried to push for thicker radiator support, as well as stripping out drive bays in favor of front mount rads so we’ll see what actually gets released.
There was also a prototype of another unnamed case with a fascia that slides down to reveal the drive bays:
The plastic felt a bit cheap on this one, hopefully that will be improved on the final version.
Of course Lepa and Enermax are also know for their power supplies and there were a couple of supplies that were specifically new for CES. Efficiency is nearly always the talk of PSU companies and so Enermax had their new silent power supply:
With platinum becoming the norm for high end supplies it’s much easier to make fanless supplies for lower wattages and we applaud this. mITX is all the rage and when combined with good water cooling then a power supply can quickly become the noisiest part of the PC. Speaking of platinum, Lepa were also showing off their recently announced platinum supplies including the 1000W, 1375W and 1700W versions. The 1700W is pretty exciting for miners but sadly is limited to 230V only. There was also a pretty sexy looking white more budget orientated PSU.
Lastly we had some eye candy in the form of some modded cases:
The “girl gamer” themed Ostrog with integrated jewelry box:
And the Pacific Rim inspired “Gypsy Danger”:
