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.