They Don’t Call It Hungover For Nothing.

Ξ March 18th, 2007 | → 0 Comments | ∇ |

I don’t drink so a hangover is hardly the correct term, however the weeks activities had finally caught up with me and I felt very much worse for ware this morning. The other guys got back at 4:30am, and having to get up at 8am to start our journey home meant the other guys literally looked like they’d been hit with bricks. HAHAHA

We had some morning shenanigans and nearly missed the train to Hamburg-hoff which would have meant missing our flight, but by the skin of our teeth and ruthless German efficiency (their public transport system kicks the crap out of ours) we got there on time

Anyway, some extra titbits I can remember off the top of my head:

MSI had some G86/G84 on their stand as Tim wrote about here, but what Tim didn’t say was that as we were being shown round the stand, the NVIDIA product manager (PM) came over and was seriously pissed off, demanding MSI take them down as no other company had any on show. 2+2 together: NVIDIA were meant to launch their G84/86 at CeBit but put it back to increase production and subsequently availability on launch, since AMD put back their R6xx range in the first place.

Creative charge $40 per X-Fi chip on the MSI 680i motherboard that includes it. The 680i is already an expensive chipset, so this means MSI will probably have to charge a lot or make next to nothing on it.

The news through the CeBit grapevine is that NVIDIA has stopped production of its 680i chipset and is now only clearing inventory in preference for its new, cheaper 680i LT.

The X38 was discussed in places at CeBit and is due to take the place of the 975X, but will only support DDR3 (see bit for full news sometime within the next 24 hours). The details are under NDA for a long while yet, however.

DFI are due to bring out a couple more boards in the near future! And their Infinity board is looking less industrial and more consumer with a black PCB. After talking to the Tony, the technical guru at OCZ who did a load of memory testing and debugging for DFI RD600, he said that 2V through the RD600 chipset will cause serious electromigration and will kill it in a week. AMD has only rated it to 1.5V, but the DFI allows 2.++ through it. Intreaged, I asked if DFI had had many back because of this and they said no, none had burnt out. The only few they had had RMA’d were from stupid people popping off the northbridge heatsink improperly, cracking the chipset.

Even though Asus are preparing a 680i LT board (like everyone else), they still plan to sell their P5N32-E SLI Plus board and market it aggressively. This will put a lot of pressure on other manufacturers selling 680i LTs, and might bring prices down across the board: win win for the consumer.

What I’m most excited about:
Razor Mavo speakers: For engineering samples the audio demo was seriously kick ass. They won’t be that cheap, but the technology behind them sounds incredible. The people at the company are probably the most laid back I met when I was there; if you haven’t met people before you have to engage your PR-filter in order to get the true facts out of what they are saying about a product, but Razor seemed very straight up and honest.

Asus soundcard: I can’t wait to get my hands on it.

Silverstone cases: Some of these looked incredible.
The “50″ 1333FSB Intel CPUs: For OC-goodness. I want to roll about the floor in glee like we did when we first saw Core 2.

Barcelona: Same as above.

OCZ NIA headband thingy: Simply because it looks crazy and unique, and to find out if it really makes a difference.

NVIDIA has it’s 70-series integrated chipset to compete with the 690G coming out soon, and these boards were being shown off at CeBit. In the coming weeks were putting together a new test suite, system directed at integrated graphics performance to look at and properly compare 690G, NVIDIA-70xx and Intel GMA3000 platforms. Hopefully this will make things more relevant for everyone.