CES 2012 Day 0 - Press Day - MSI Thermaltake and nVidia

Every year CES has a zero day where the exhibits are only open to members of the press, basically to give them a chance to get in a few extra meetings and attend the keynotes. In the past I have taken this time to hit a little while ball down a long fairway into a little cup, but alas that didn't happen this time around.

Which is both good and bad.

MSI
My first stop for CES this year was to visit the MSI suite and ask the tough questions like how is your HD 7000 series going to flush out? How many different X79 boards are you going to release and what the hell is this thing in the little silver box.

First on the list was the X79 and pictured here is the business end of the flagship X79 Big Bang Xpower II. As some of you may remember this is the military themed motherboard designed to fill in the ultra high end segment looking to express their GPU dominance. The board features 20+ PWM phases and some very unique heatsinks that not only look pretty good but contain quite a bit of additional mass.

At Computex MSI showed how you could run Afterburner from your smart phone, well now they have extended that functionality to the new MSI Control Center. Basically this is software that controls the UEFI features from within windows.




Since I bought it up there will be a similar lineup with the 7900 series that we saw with the 6900 series so start looking for those to start coming out late in February.

Lastly we have this fancy silver box hooked into a Macbook, what is it? Early in 2011 Intel announced a new technology called Thunderbolt which is basically a PCI Express extension served up over displayport. When it was first released many users figured it was for super fast storage but it can also be used to expand PCI Express connectivity, and in this case means discrete external graphics for your graphics limited Apple notebooks.




There are some limits but basically it will support any video card that doesn't require external PCI Express power.

ThermalTake
The next stop was at the Thermaltake Suite and even though they didn't have much new on display they did have too much stuff to show in this blog post. Suffice to say there will be more versions of the Level 10 GT including these two beauties called the Level 10 GTS.



From what I have been told the "S" doesn't mean small but rather "system builder". Even though it is clearly a smaller and more compact version of the Level 10 GT.

Look for more images from Thermaltake in the CES 2012 image gallery

The final stop of the day was to attend the nVidia keynote speech where Jen-Hsun Huang talked about the future of Tegra 3 and how it would be applied to the next generation of tablets. The presentation was rather entertaining and consisted of a demo of Ice cream Sandwich and how you can play first person shooter games on the ASUS Transformer Prime on a LAN against gamers such as Johnathan Wendel (Fatal1ty).






During the presentation Jen-Hsun also played a game of Skyrim on his Transformer Prime by using Splashtop to connect to a Windows 7 PC.