Everyone's trying to be cool at this show

IN AN OTHERWISE comparatively boring Computex edition, one interesting observation came to my mind: extraordinary cooling was everywhere.

In fact, more than ever water-cooled or Peltier-cooled or cryo-cooled or anything-but-air-cooled CPUs, boards, graphics cards, even memory DIMMs, were on nearly every major booth.

Even the Hyatt hotel suites were following suit: both Corsair and OCZ had some very interesting water cooling solutions. Corsairs old yet still going strong Nautilus 500 was running the new FSB1333 Core CPUs with memory up to DDR3-2000. The old chap can still pull 500W of heat away, and it has done so well on one on my quad core systems too. Our Theo went a step ahead and replaced the radiator fan with a faster one, to be able to cool something like 700W of aggregate load on one of his dual-GPU machines.

On the other hand, the OCZ's new integrated cooler / heat pipe radiator with carbon nanotube heat dissipation element, and supposedly incredible performance for a standalone unit, when it ships in a few months.

MSI's P35 demo machine was, well, cryocooled and running at some 4.2 GHz off the quad-core QX6800 - actually, it could do even better than that.

On the graphics side, both Sapphire and Asus showed water-cooled R600XT cards with common cooling system for a dual-card Crossfire configuration. Leadtek did the same for the dual Geforce 8800 Ultra "Leviathan" configuration with an incredible 684 MHz GPU / 2326 MHz graphics clocking. Many vendors like Thermaltake and Zalman also offered seemingly capable 8800-series custom watercooling blocks with easy install. We'll test some of these.

Finally, the casing enclosures with fully integrated high-end water cooling are shown in many places too. This is important, as the pump and the radiator have to be there, so why not inside the box for easier handling. More on this coming in individual product tests. µ