Original Link: https://www.anandtech.com/show/2710



There was a difference at this year's CES: fewer companies with coolers, chassis, and power supplies were actually on the show floor and more in suites around the Strip. This is why we have toured hotel suites for the first couple of days and didn't even come close to the actual show floor until Saturday. Some companies had many new products to show or at least initial samples. Some others came with products that already launched and didn't show anything new. Antec is one of the companies with a whole new lineup of products, the P1000 chassis perhaps being the most interesting.

Antec's New P1000 Gamer Chassis

Antec is showing off their new P1000 at this year's CES. It's a new gamer chassis that Antec put a lot of work into creating. Even though this chassis is still in development it could be out very soon. Antec showed it at the show to get feedback from editors and customers and it seems that feedback was very positive so far. Please give us your thoughts about in the comment section, and you can be sure Antec will see them.

The chassis has a metal structure covered with plastic sheets to improve the appearance. The surface is rough instead of smooth, which we found appealing. There are handlebars on all four corners to aid in moving the case around, with the chassis standing on the two on the bottom.

The venting concept seems to be very cool and we are looking forward to testing it. The front is totally closed and the air comes in through the large openings on the sides. Antec wants to keep larger openings facing away from the user to keep noise down. The side panel has another large fan installed with the opening angled towards the back - again to keep noise from projecting at the user. The top has a 200mm fan that exhausts most of the air from the chassis. The back sports another 120mm fan at the height of the CPU to help exhaust air.

Antec installed three hard drive cages, each supporting three vertically mounted hard drives. The bays are easily removable to the front. (Please note that the fan on the one picture of the drive bay is installed facing the wrong direction). The inside of the chassis is all black. You will be able to install a normal ATX size power supply or Antec's own standard like the CP-850. We do hope this case is available soon, with a price of around $200 to $250.

Power Supplies: CP-850, a New Earthwatts, and a New TruePower

Antec is one of the first retail brands to say good-bye to the normal ATX standard - at least on one of their products. The CP-850 uses Antec's own standard that is basically just a taller casing for the power supply. With this design Antec is able to stick a large 120mm fan at the front of the PSU to push air through the power supply. There are two main PCBs inside as we have seen in the Signature series. The taller construction also enables Antec to choose larger components that are obviously cheaper than special smaller ones that fit in normal sized power supplies. That means the CP-850 should be cheaper than other power supplies with the same specs, with the big disadvantage that it won't fit in any cases other than some of Antec's latest offerings.

The Earthwatts and TruePower series both extend to 750W with the EA-750 and TP-750 Blue, and the TruePower Quattro comes now with up 1200W. We have seen this model before and we hope it's finally ready to ship to the retail market. In general, we see more high-wattage power supplies these days from Antec; we hope the company doesn't forget the smaller wattage offerings that many have come to appreciate.



OCZ with New Power Supplies


There are actually only two new power supplies from OCZ and PC Power & Cooling. OCZ announced the EcoStream series, which is supposed to reach up to 88% efficiency with 120VAC. We couldn't determine who the original manufacturer is (it looks like FSP at first sight) but we will make sure we do so once we have a sample in the labs. The UL number is from OCZ. The four 12V rails are rated at 18A each for the 650W version and there is also a 550W version that wasn't on display.


The second addition from the company to the larger power supplies comes from the PC Power & Cooling branch with the Silencer 910W. This will use a Seasonic design that already works in the other Silencer power supplies. The 910W power supply will be the bridge between the Silencer 750W and Turbo Cool 1200W, since PCP&C discontinued the 1000W Turbo Cool unit.

A Case from OCZ?

Yes, there is a case on display and OCZ told us a few months ago that something like this would pop up at some point. We didn't actually get much information about this case, but the gallery shows a few shots from it. It looks like a steel body case with an aluminum front panel.



Silverstone


Silverstone was one of the companies showing their products on the show floor, and one of the most interesting offerings is the Raven chassis. It's not actually new since the company has showed it before, but the good news is that it will be available very soon. The concept is very nice and definitely something new to the market. Silverstone turned the whole motherboard 90° to the front and now the side with the I/O ports actually faces up.

The chassis comes in a futuristic design that isn't really to our taste but there will almost certainly be people that love it. The front door slides down to provide access to the optical devices. All of the switches and USB ports are on the top, so if you have this chassis standing on the floor beside you there will be no problem reaching them. If you look at the back the appearance is kind of odd, since there are no graphics cards jacks anymore, no USB ports, and so on. Only the power supply sits in the same old position at the bottom of the case.

When you look inside, things really look different. The positive to this layout is you will not need very long cables on the power supply anymore even with a bottom-mounted PSU. Cables with a length of up to 40cm will be sufficient for PCI-E and the ATX main connectors. The hard drives sit on the right side, lined up vertically. There are definitely positive aspects of this concept, but there are negatives as well. Silverstone has a cover for the top connectors (i.e. the monitor and other devices) but it still looks rather odd. We will withhold any final judgment until we can test the chassis in a real-world setup.

We haven't seen many new products in the power supply and chassis field from Silverstone, but did show some cool FT01 cases with nice paintjobs.



Thermaltake

Thermaltake had the most products on display out of all the companies we visited. Let's get started with the Xpressar, which is nothing new but Thermaltake now brings the cooling unit in the convenient format of a small box that fits into four 5.25" drive bays. You can get two units and cool your CPU and GPU with it, and if you have a larger chassis why not trying to fit three of them inside?

The Element S chassis is a new adventure for Thermaltake. It looks very sleek which is a new move for the company, since most other previous chassis were… let's just say different. The hard drive cage is removable and you can even turn it 90° so that the front of the hard drives faces the fans at the front of the case. We were shocked to see two 60mm fans at the back of the case, but Thermaltake won't actually ship the case with these fans; they only wanted to show what is possible. The company also thought a step ahead and the user will be possible to install 2.5" hard drives in this chassis, which is a very cool idea considering the number of 2.5" SSDs currently available.

Over the last year, Thermaltake has had quite a mess with its lineup of power supplies, and they want to straighten things up now. We saw many power supplies again, but nothing really new other than the Evo Blue - a funny looking product with blue LED lights. We also saw the TR2 QFan series that we have recommended more than once, and it seems that it's finally making its way to the market. Thermaltake claims the delays have been due to the high production costs and a "very small market" - which we find rather difficult to believe, considering the interest expressed by our readers in "reasonable" wattage PSUs. There are also a couple of higher wattage power supplies for some series to fill in gaps.

There were many cases on display as well but nothing particularly noteworthy. The HTPC section was interesting though. Thermaltake has two HTPC cases, the DH 103 and DH 104, and they're so big that you can fit in any kind of graphics card setup with an almost limitless number of hard drives. According to Thermaltake, there is a market where people want an HTPC with the latest high-end components for playing the latest high-end games in addition to other HTPC duties.



Zalman with New Coolers and Power Supplies

There will be a new larger CPU cooler, the CNPS9900 LED. It can cool any of the new processors including the Core i7. The second cooler started as a graphics card cooler; once installed the engineers of Zalman found out it has the potential to cool even modern CPUs, so they added all of the necessary mounting brackets.

Finally, Zalman released two new power supplies. These power supplies don't come with a series name, but there is a large Extreme written on them. The two new power supplies come are rated at 660W and 770W. We had a closer look and it appears these two new power supplies are made by Enhance, just like the ZM850 and ZM1000. Both new power supplies come with 80 Plus Bronze certification, which is a slightly higher efficiency standard than vanilla 80 Plus.

If you want to see nice video footage from the CES head over to German PC-Max.

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