Release roundup: Gaming cases, tiny mobos, and more


by Cyril Kowaliski — 9:33 AM on September 23, 2011

This week in our look at miscellaneous product releases, we bring tidings from Enermax, LaCie, Lian Li, Thermaltake, and Zotac:

  • Enermax introduces a new down flow CPU cooler. Tower-style coolers seem awfully fashionable today, but they're not the only way to keep a CPU nice and chilly. Enermax's new ETD-T60 series coolers have a "down flow" design, with a set of six heat pipes connecting the CPU to an array of fins that sits parallel to the motherboard. Those fins are ventilated by a 120-mm, Twister-bearing, pulse-width modulation fan. Enermax has implemented a patented Auto-Adjustable-Pressure mounting system, which purportedly supports "various CPU sockets and gives perfect contact force (18~28kgw) in between CPU and cooler." Expect to pay $59 for the vanilla ETD-T60-TB and $69 for the ETD-T60-VD, which has red and blue LEDs.

  • LaCie Little Big Disk Thunderbolt Series now available. With its latest product family, LaCie is bringing Thunderbolt connectivity to the world of external storage... for a price. The Little Big Disk Thunderbolt series includes 1TB 7,200-RPM and 2TB 5,400-RPM mechanical options priced at—wait for it—$399 and $499, respectively. While LaCie boasts about "shocking 10Gb/s speeds," the spec sheet reveals that the hard drives inside the Thunderbolt enclosures have 6Gbps SATA interfaces and peak transfer speeds of 180-190MB/s. A solid-state option is also available, but that'll only get you speeds as high as 480MB/s, nowhere near Thunderbolt's 10Gbps (1.25GB/s) peak. LaCie sells the drives without Thunderbolt cables and only covers them with a three-year warranty, too. Yikes.

  • Lian Li announces the latest PC-TU200. Lian Li's new baby isn't cheap, either, at $199. However, it has some nice perks that should please LAN partygoers: a carrying handle, a rather small chassis that accommodates Mini-ITX and Mini-DTX motherboards, aluminum contruction with a "base weight" of only 2.8 lbs, a 140-mm front intake fan, support for graphics cards as long as 11.8", and both external Serial ATA and USB 3.0 ports on the front panel. The PC-TU200 is due to arrive at "local distributors" at the end of this month.
  • Thermaltake introduces Overseer RX-I e-sports chassis. This latest addition to Thermaltake's gaming mid-tower case repertoire is certainly a showy one, but it appears to tick most of the right boxes. You've got a hard-drive dock at the top, two USB 3.0 ports at the front, support for graphics cards as long as 12.5", a bottom-mounted power supply emplacement, and five internal 3.5" drive bays. Stock cooling also seems generous, with a pair of 200-mm fans supplemented by a 120-mm spinner. Users can chuck in another three fans if they so choose.

  • Zotac announces A75-ITX WiFi. Zotac's latest Mini-ITX board features an FM1 socket and an AMD A75 chipset, making it ripe for use with A8-, A6-, A4-, and E2-series Llano APUs. Other features include two DDR3 DIMM slots, a trio of display outputs (DVI, HDMI, and VGA), a PCI Express x16 slot, four SATA 6Gbps ports, six USB 3.0 ports (plus two via a header on the board), dual Gigabit Ethernet, built-in 802.11n Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 3.0, and onboard audio with Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD Master Audio certifications. Not bad for such a tiny motherboard.

I have to say, I like the look of that Lian Li case. $199 is a little rich for my blood, though, especially for an enclosure that can't house a full-sized machine.

   
Register
Tip: You can use the A/Z keys to walk threads.
View options

This discussion is now closed.