CES 2012 Day 1 Coverage Review - PAGE 2

Zotac International Limited (or just plain Zotac) have made a name for themselves through its ITX-based motherboards and NVIDIA graphics cards that they have released over the years. Their booth this year continued to underline their commitment to both markets, with a wide array of both types of products displayed.

The motherboards showcased for both Intel and AMD chipsets boasted a wealth of features such as built-in Wi-Fi and Bluetooth with connectors for external antennas. They also sport fairly impressive video chipsets for such a small package, with the AMD boards featuring such chips as the AMD HD 6310 and the HD 6000, and the Intel boards utilizing either the NVIDIA GT 520 or Intel HD 3000 on-board silicon. These boards look to be designed with a media PC focus and come with lots of connectors for SPDIF audio, HDMi ports, and integrated RAID controllers supporting 0, 1, 0+1, and 5 configurations. I personally cannot wait for these to hit shelves sometime late Spring 2012 so that I can get one for that carputer rig that I am planning.

Zotac also brought a selection of their graphics cards. These cards are all based on NVIDIA silicon and support current interface options such as PCI, PCIe x1, and of course PCIe x16. However, these cards are not based on the top of the line GPU offerings from NVIDIA since this year Zotac was showcasing their products that are oriented around the ITX and other smaller form factors. They do offer their own versions of the GeForce GTX 590 and 580 on their website.

Lastly, the Zotac booth had a display featuring a new cooling system they are developing. Over the years, all computer nerds have heard about people using fish tanks full of de-ionized water, mineral oil, or some other wacky fluid in an attempt to produce an immersion water-cooled system. Usually these setups are a mess and have issues with fluid evaporation or conductivity. However, Zotac has approached this concept with a new fluid that they were quite tight-lipped about; what was clear was that their working demonstration was easily the star attraction of their booth. Through my line of questioning I was able to squeeze out of the company rep the fact that the fluid itself was currently worth about $250 per gallon and only needed replacing every 5 to 6 years under continuous usage.  Another hint Zotac shared was that they were utilizing the endothermic characteristic that occurs when a fluid changes phase from a liquid to a gas. This cooling phenomenon allowed the hardware shown in the photos below to stay nice and cool. The temps posted in the HWMonitor screen were the actual temperatures that the system was posting under an 81% load in FurMark with 640x360 resolution settings and without anti-aliasing.

Readers of this article might be concerned that the temperatures for the processor were a little elevated, especially compared with the temps reported for the videocard. This was to be expected though, because the Zotac representatives were also showcasing a special type of heatsink for use in this system that was only attached to the GPU core. The CPU itself was just the bare metal of the chip's built in heat spreader. This heatsink was a little inch-and-a-half by inch-and-a-half square of what looked like a little orange heatsink that would have not been surprising to find on a computer from '98. According to the representative on the showroom floor, this was no ordinary heatsink as it was coated with a diamond dust that had been affixed with a layer of anodized metal. This little heatsink really did a lot for the cooling performance, as the videocard was under 81% load and was sitting at 45C while the 2600K i7 was sitting at ~70C. 

In the photos above you can see the turbulence created in the cooling fluid as it boils at the hot surfaces and cools them down. Honestly, I am not sure how they were re-condensing the cooling fluid, but I know the massive heatsink up at the top had something to do it. At this point I would say that this entire setup was mainly an interesting technical demonstration, but I am not sure how feasible this would be in an average consumer setup.