TwinMOS

TwinMOS were showing off their full range of memory products as well as wireless LAN products which they are starting to dabble in.

At their booth we were firstly shown their new Twister DDR-500 high performance memory for enthusiasts. TwinMOS has only recently decided to enter the high performance memory market to compete with such companies as Corsair and OCZ. TwinMOS still intend on producing their mainstream and value memory but with a fairly big push towards the enthusiast side of things as the market slowly demands more of it.

The new Twister product is an example of this which is pictured above. Using a new packaging technology designed on the T-SOP system, the die and wafer of the memory module are no longer packaged in a ceramic package but rather directly cooled with heatsinks. This will allow a greater heat transfer rate since the ceramic barrier has been removed and the die is making direct contact with a passively cooled surface. TwinMOS are not the first to use this style of technology; we have also recently received modules from Geil which use the same process. As DDR-2 emerges, we are likely to see more and more of this type of thing happening.

It remains to be seen just how much this technology will improve overclocking (if any), but you would think it would at least offer something or it would make the hours of R & D pointless.

EPoX

Next in line after traveling on the free shuttle bus from Hall 1 was our friends at EPoX in Hall 2, the motherboard hall, who were showing of their range of Intel and AMD based motherboards as well as their new small form factor systems.

On the AMD side of things, EPoX had a display Athlon 64 system on display which was based on VIA K8T800 chipset as well as Athlon XP motherboards:

And on the Intel side of things, we saw a whole range of VIA based Intel Pentium 4 motherboards as well as current Intel based chipset products such as 875P, 865PE and the new Single Channel version of the Springdale, 848P. The most interesting Intel motherboard EPoX had on display would have to be their VIA PT880 which is a Dual Channel version of the PT800:

It was a pleasant surprise to see that EPoX has decided to enter the rapidly growing small form factor market with their new line of "Mini Me" computers with one AGP slot and one PCI slot as well as a total of 8 USB ports, LAN and 5.1 sound, etc. The units we saw were based on the Intel 865G chipset and are similar in size to Shuttle's popular XPC units. Differentiating from Shuttle though, EPoX include a fairly large and quality blue LCD display which shows such system information as CPU clock speed, memory amount, screen resolution and volume level, etc.

The extra nice thing about these units is the fact that you can play AM and FM radio without the need of powering on the system. This is a trend I am sure we will see more and more of as time passes.

EPoX designed the "Mini Me" in a way which allows you to hide the CDROM drive which makes things look a little bit nicer. However, the down side is you won't be able to use slot loading drives with this system because of the nature of the setup.

The following two shots show the insides of the system and the EPoX method of dissipating CPU heat from the system to the outside world:

Enough time had been spent with EPoX and it was time to meet with Power Color.