Taiwanese Edimax is generally known as a company that is offering budget routers with fairly antiquated UI's, but the company is working on new 802.11ac hardware that is looking like a big step up from its current hardware. Edimax has teamed up with Broadcom for the hardware and its initial products will feature simultaneous dual band support.
CeBIT might be past us for this time, but we still have a few titbits left from the show that we want to share. First up is ECS' H61H2-TI mini-ITX motherboard which might not sound all that exciting at first, until you realise that it has a unique feature in the shape of HDMI input.
It's been quite a few years since we last saw a watercooling solution in retail from Cooler Master, despite the company demoing various solutions over the past two years at all the major trade shows. Now the company has finally decided to make a return to the watercooling business, initially in Europe only with its new Eisberg series of coolers.
With several recently announced monster cases – or Ultra Towers as Cooler Master prefers – such as the Cosmos II, the company was demoing its first high-end mini-ITX chassis at CeBIT last week, the Elite 120. The cube shaped case doesn't really stand out from the crowd in terms of design, in fact it looks a lot like some of Silver Stone's mATX cubes, but Cooler Master has done a pretty decent job on small chassis.
Once in a while you run into a company you've never heard of that has a product that makes you wonder why no-one thought of it before. AIO is such a company, although speaking to a representative of the company at CeBIT, it turns out their heritage is from a defunct case maker and the product in question is its Myriad chassis.
We saw a preview of Giada's Uni-box just ahead of CeBIT and at the show we got a couple of minutes of hands on time with it and there's a reason for the unusually two-tone chassis design, as the Uni-box is made up from two different PCBs. In fact, the main motherboard was never intended for the Uni-box and as such we're looking at something of a bi-product here that worked out to be an interesting product in its own right.
Once in a while you run into the oddest companies at trade shows and although Korean Valueplus isn't that odd in itself, as it's a manufacturer of a wide range of Android powered media players, but its retail branding which is TizzBird, is rather odd. Still, the company has some interesting products and its latest addition is the Stick N1, an HDMI adapter that turns your dumb TV into a smart TV.
At CeBIT, Synology was demoing a pair of new NAS products, both being 4-bay units with a fairly similar external design, but the internal hardware is quite different between the two models. The company has not only revised the internals, but the two new models share the new re-designed enclosure as well which looks similar to the DS212 series, albeit larger due to the additional drive bays.
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Last week at CeBIT, Thermaltake officially unveiled the Level 10 M mouse which the company co-designed with BMW Designworks USA to much fanfare and the feature laden mouse does stand out from the crowd in more than one way. Sadly Thermaltake wasn't ready for hands on time, but we did at least manage to snap a couple of shots of the new mouse.
We were fortunate enough to get a preview of Gigabyte's high-end 7-series chipset motherboards ahead of CeBIT, but it turned out that the company had plenty more on offer at CeBIT. As such, here's a fairly quick run-down of the new models on display at the show, as there are far too many products for us to cover them all in detail.
We've seen a fair few motherboards during CeBIT, but none of them were as insane as ASRock's new X79 Extreme11, as the company appears to have gone out of its way to create the most feature packed motherboard you could imagine and then some.
Last week OCZ announced that it was going to be showing off its Indilinx Everest 2 based Vertex 4 SSD at CeBIT and the company did indeed have a couple of units up and running at the show. What we're not so sure about is the so called industry leading performance that the press release was talking about, but it's by no means a sloth.
It can't be easy being a tier three graphics card maker, but AFOX out of Hong Kong showed off a custom made Radeon HD 7850 card at CeBIT. The card is the first single slot Radeon HD 7850 card we've seen so far and despite this, AFOX has managed to squeeze in four display connectors.
Manli – one of several companies that is part of the PC Partner group out of Hong Kong – was showing off its latest mini PC at CeBIT and it's simply called the Manli Elite. It's similar to Zotac's ZBOX mini systems, but with a different design and upgraded hardware.
We're not entirely sure what's going on within Gigabyte, but currently it's ODM aka "whitebox" department has much more impressive tablet than its notebook division. That said, the GN-TB100 as the tablet is known as should at least arrive somewhere in retail, although under a different brand so it might take some figuring out as to who will be selling it.
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