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SSDs are faster, more robust, and use less power than comparable HDDs found in most notebooks and desktops. The main reason that the SSD isn't more widely used today is that the price is still too high for most consumers to bite.

Kingston has unveiled a new version of its SSDNow V series drive that comes in at 30GB capacity. The drive will sell for under $80 after rebates, which makes it one of the cheapest SSDs on the market. At the 30GB size, it will be mostly of use for a boot drive only with bulk storage to a different drive. Kingston will however also be offering the drive as part of a an upgrade bundle and also in a two-pack for those looking to RAID right from the get go.

The SSD has Windows 7 TRIM functionality and promises read speed of 180MB/sec and a write speed of 50MB/sec.

As we've previously heard and are expecting to be launched this week, AMD is about to extend its HD 5000 series lineup of desktop graphics cards further with new lower-mainstream variants in the 5600 series. We'll of course have a review online of our first sample right from the get go.

However, what's only just been revealed now is that AMD also plans to squeeze another model into its existing 5800 series lineup, the HD 5830. This card is designed to fill the gap between the HD 5770 and HD 5850.

The HD 5830 is said to offer comparable performance to the previous series HD 4890 card while shifting at a lower price point and carrying more features (DX11 being the main advantage).

CES 2010 - We had high hopes of being able to test an SSD based on the Marvell SATA 6G controller at CES but everyone chose to keep a tight grip on their SSDs. To add insult to injury everyone also chose to keep their lips sealed as to when we would actually see this drive in our labs. The best we can tell you at this point is we will see the Crucial RealSSD C300 some time in Q1.

This seems to be on the same track as the SandForce controller based products for the retail sector but the difference is that we have two SandForce drives in our hands now. It should be said that the two SandForce powered RunCore Pro 5's do have serial numbers 5 and 10 and were hand delivered from an engineer from the APAC region.

At this point it is too early to tell which controller is going to be the best for server and consumer applications. SSDs are better at every task over traditional platter based drives but some do better than others at specific tasks and workloads.

CoolIT Systems launched four new products at CES and won four new Innovations International Awards. The new products, OMNI A.L.C. VGA cooler, Maestro E.S.P. fan control, ECO A.L.C. CPU Cooler and VANTAGE A.L.C. CPU Cooler were all on display at CES along with custom solutions.

CES 2010 - CoolIT also displayed several components that go into their award winning total solutions products.

Here we see the new ECO A.L.C, a new low cost CPU cooling solution that is set to hit the market right away.

CES 2010 - During our time at CES we got the chance to stop by the Cooler Master Suite. This was an interesting time and offered us a look at what Cooler Master currently has as well as some new items that are to come.

When we first walked in we were greeted by a display of OEM coolers for both AMD and Intel. It was after this short stop that the fun started. We were taken into a separate room that contained some products that are coming later in 2010. Unfortunately we were not allowed to Photograph any of them but we can tell you that we saw the next evolution in the CM Storm case and mouse line. The case looks to be a continuation of the sniper with some minor aesthetic adjustments. Air flow and cooling should be just as good as you have come to expect from CM. The second future product we saw was a mockup of future gaming mouse. This one adds ambidextrous use to the list of features it has. The feel of the mouse is good in your hand and the look is nothing short of fantastic.

After we left the "no-photos" room we saw some less secret items that we were able to show you. One of the ones that will be of interest to gamers and other enthusiasts is Cooler Master's new line of high-performance PSUs. These will sell under the GX brand and are all single rail high current PSUs with silver 80+ ratings.

CES 2010 - CoolIT were showing off its second concept PC at CES this year with the XO2 fully water-cooled concept design.

This system was one of the more impressive things we saw this year here in Las Vegas. In the size of a case that resembles a small home theater system, CoolIT's CEO told us that it was the most overclocked system that they had on display at their booth.

The XO2 implements a full water cooled design that cools all the main components of the system and allows high performance in a smaller form factor than usual. The system is also completely silent, which is something that many consumers enjoy. Watch our video below as Geoff Lyon tells us all about it.

CES 2010 - Even though I didn't get much time to cruise the CES show floor and look around and all the fancy new consumer focused technology, we did manage to stop by the humongous Samsung booth.

Samsung also put on a big showing at CES and this year clearly the focus was on televisions with large fantastic looking and thin OLED HDTVs and 3D TVs getting a big showing. At the front of the Samsung booth was a presentation with about 150 TVs at a rough count with large mirrors placed appropriate to present an excellent show of its technology.

Quite amazing, huh? Samsung went out big this year with televisions and consumers should be excited about what's happening in this section of the market.

PC peripheral mob Mad Catz has let loose some info (and images) of a new range of keyboards and mice to be officially introduced later in the month.

This new range of keyboards and mice come under Mad Catz' 'Eclipse' family. Beginning with the Eclipse Wireless litetouch keyboard, this is the most expensive in the new lineup with a very sleek design with backlit scissor keys and fancy touch sensitive panel in place of the usual numpad.

It also sports a 360 degree trackball with left/right mouse buttons which helps in the instance it's used for a HTPC etc. - The touchpad has three differing modes; numpad mode, media mode and MyEclipse mode. MyEclipse mode allows for easy customization of the 12 available buttons so that they can be used for the quicklaunch of apps or websites.

CES 2010 - One of the standout items being showcased at ASUS' booth is a final sample of the company's next flagship LGA1366 X58 motherboard, the Rampage III Extreme.

Some radical changes have been made to this board over its predecessor, the Rampage II Extreme. The biggest and most useful performance oriented change is this board's ability to run up to four double slot NvIDIA or ATI graphics cards with its well spaced out PCI-e 2.0 x16 slots. ASUS ensures there'll be no hindrance in the way of available PCIe lanes by including NVIDIA's nForce 200 chip and PCI bridge to assist in taking on four-card SLI and CrossFire.

Other enhancements include ROG Connect with the ability to overclock using Bluetooth (mobile phones etc.), discrete SATA 6Gb/s and USB 3.0 controllers which won't affect graphics performance when used unlike other boards, thanks to ASUS' PCI-E 2.0 bridge implementation, a superior CPU VRM setup with super-ML capacitors being used for both the CPU and memory power circuits and slimmer low-profile heatsinks said to be made of ceramic composite which help make the board more adaptable to larger CPU cooling solutions.

CES 2010 - RunCore hit the ground running here in Vegas allowing us to test the new Pro V powered by the SandForce 1500 controller and consumer MLC memory. The TweakTown Storage Produce Test Workstation is now residing in their booth so everyone can come and test the drive first hand.

Also at the RunCore booth the company is showing just how resilient their solid state products are. Here we see two Pro IV model SSDs attached to a paint shaker. RunCore then powers the drives and attaches then to the workstation. The modified paint shaker is then activated and the drives are abused in unnatural ways.

RunCore also had a surprise for everyone, here we see a SSD fully submerged in water yet still powered on and churning data.

CES 2010 - So when we stopped by the EVGA suite we got the chance to have some hands on time with their new dual socket 1366 board. This workstation class board seems to be perfectly setup for NVIDIA's Fermi cards. But the question we have is where in the market does this board fit?

If the information we were given from EVGA is right this new board covers both the extreme high-end gaming enthusiast as well as the emerging professional market that utilizes the power of the GPGPU. After all with seven PCI-e x16 slots (through the use of NF200 bridges) that is enough for four NVIDIA or AMD GPUs. If you are a CUDA fan you can get some amazing CUDA performance from this type of setup. Especially give the move of Adobe products to using CUDA GPGPU technology.

The board will be centered on an Tylersburg 5520 chipset but will feature the same highly overclockable components found on EVGA's Classified boards. The board will also support EVGA's EV bot for monitoring and overcloking.

CES 2010 - Back at Computex last year Thermaltake debuted its eSports brand and idea to the world and it looks like we are about to be able to buy the first batch of products designers purely for gamers.

During our visit at CES we were shown a couple of upcoming keyboards that see many of the popular high-end gaming keyboard features, but a price that the average gamer can actually afford.

What is entirely different though is that the keyboard is able to support two cooling fans at front left and right of the keyboard. We tried out the keyboard for a short time and could definitely feel the air flowing through my hands and fingers.

CES 2010 - On the 2nd day of the actual show we got a chance to talk to Kingston. They had a few interesting items up on display. One of the first we saw was a few possible new color choices for your RAM. These included pink and even purple. But there was more than just color options being shown off at the Kingston Suite.

One of the first things that Kingston wanted us to take a look at was how well their new 16GB memory (4x4GB) kit for Core i5 handled RAM intensive applications like Photoshop. To do this they took a series of stitched photos (digital images combined to form a panoramic) that were exposure bracketed and combines them into a single HDR image file. This process involves having multiple images each containing up to 12 vector layers.

The system we were shown was using 14 of the 16GB of ram available and was still responsive and able quick. From there Kingston took us to see a new product. This is their 24GB triple (6x4GB) channel kit for the Core i7 X58 combination. To show the capability of this RAM to handle high loads Kingston had setup an interesting demo. They had VMWare Server installed and running a Windows 7 VM as a guest. Inside this Guest they opened a number of windows causing the system to max out the full 24GB.

CES 2010 - On display at ASUS' booth was a new ATX form-factor motherboard based on AMD's 890G chipset, a known successor to 790GX with its performance oriented IGP.

Dubbed the M4A89GTOD PRO, the board supports 2-way CrossFireX (x8 / x8) discrete graphics, but also has an integrated DX10.1 compliant IGP (DX11 would have been nice, when's that coming AMD?).

The feature-set on this board is very nice thanks to the AMD SB800 Southbridge. This is potentially the first motherboard chipset that gives native SATA 6Gb/s support with the ability to control up to six of them (which the M4A89GTOD PRO makes full of). Further to those six ports is another (black) SATA 3 Gb/s port, an IDE port and an eSATA port which is controlled by an external JMicron storage controller.

CES 2010 - Patriot is a company most tend to think of when it comes to desktop memory and secondly SSDs. We visited the Patriot suite today here during CES and the company that is celebrating its 25th anniversary this year made it rather clear to us that it intends to break out of its mold and stick its nose into new products to expand its range.

Besides this upcoming range of new SSDs that Chris will cover separately, we were able to get a first look at a whole range of new storage based products that Patriot intends to launch in 2010.

In the video below you'll see Patriot's first serious NAS device, its upcoming USB 3.0 caddies as well as its 4 x 4 unit that accepts four 2.5-inch hard drives or SSDs and is able to offer some rather solid performance numbers since it can be ran in various RAID modes.

CES 2010 - One of the most anticipated bits of hardware at CES this year is that of NVIDIA's upcoming GF100 desktop cards, but the company hasn't said much about it as yet.

However, it's possible to find fully working samples housed in various demo systems when strolling around the show floor. We first caught a glimpse of a single-card GF100 setup at Digital Experience yesterday which was running the DirectX 11-enabled Heaven benchmark from Unigine.

Spotted on the first day of CES today is another Maingear Shift rig running not one, but three GF100 cards in 3-way SLI. The rig was running NVIDIA's own developed Rocket Sled demo.

CES 2010 - Lenovo introduced their very own Smartphone. For reasons know to them they have decided to call it the Lephone. It has an interesting design and also includes features and a UI that centers on connectivity to social media. The Lephone has a very striking UI, with a home screen that resembles a flower. In the center of the flower is the contact you are staying connected with. The petals are the forms of connectivity. This is a departure from the traditional application centric phones that are out there.

The Lephone will also have a few built in "widgets" these are native applications that extend the functions of the phone (of course they look like the same ones that are on the iPhone including stocks etc). Lenovo talked about having a world of applications available at the time of launch yet for now this new phone will only be available in China. The Lephone will have a Snapdragon under the hood to provide power and will come without any physical buttons. Instead you will have a 2ndary touch area that mimics the usual "home" buttons found on many touch phones. Although the phone looks and seems to operating well, I am not sure how it will fare against the established and dominant iPhone once it gets to the US and European market.

Lenovo showed two more new products as part of their mobile computing effort. One was an extremely thin book that is also power by Snapdragon. While not much detail was given we are assuming that it will have some form of non-windows OS like Chrome or android.

CES 2010 - Continuing on with our coverage from the CES Digital Experience event we stopped by Lexar who at first wasn't showing anything overly new, but after a short time a little surprised was pulled out from under the desk.

Memory coolers are far from new, but it is good to see the folks at Crucial and Lexar joining the party. A little later on the company intends to launch the Ballistix cooler, which features two 60mm cooling fans that produce around 20 CFM and we can vouch for the comment in the video that the cooler is quiet. More details in the video below, hit play!

This may or may not indication that Crucial is getting more serious with enthusiast RAM with possibly the need to cool super fast memory like the folks such as OCZ, G.Skill, Corsair and others provide.

CES 2010 - If all goes well, consumers should be able to get their first taste of 3D Blu-ray on their computers and laptops midway through this year.

During Digital Experience we hooked up with Tom from CyberLink here in the USA who gave us a rundown on the technology, a look at the different glasses options and probably your very first look at PowerDVD 3D up and running for real, albeit a very early version, but a look nonetheless. Watch our video below.

In the demo that was on show, an Intel P55 system was setup and considering that 3D Blu-ray requires two renders of the movie to produce the extra dimension, the CPU usage of around 4 - 8% was amazing, and we are working with early software and drivers - and that is something to keep in mind.

CES 2010 - Later this week during CES we will be visiting OCZ to get a look at their newest products on display at the show, but something just hit our inbox of interest.

We are not sure if OCZ will have actually working demo samples on display at their booth, but what we get a look here is final prototype designs of OCZ's upcoming USB 3.0 SSD.

Using MLC flash memory, the anodized aluminum cased drives will come in sizes of 64, 128 and 256GB and uses a Micro B USB connector. There will be two LEDs on the drive to indication power and access activity.