We also spoke with Chris about the possibility of a redundant power supply in the normal ATX form factor and whether or not gamers would be interested in such a product. We asked Chris what he thought the maximum power output of the supply could be, knowing full well it would not be enough to power a high end machine. Sure enough, his answer was somewhere in the neighborhood of 400-500W. You can power a pretty decent gaming machine on 400-500W, but the target audience for a redundant gaming power supply is those users who have the funds for a monstrously powerful rig with all of the best components. For such a computer, 400-500W is quite simply not enough. A great idea in theory, and one there is certainly a market for, but until technology advances a bit and the components needed to pump 700-800W through such a small space can be used and cooled, redundant, standard ATX form factor power supplies for gamers will be just out of grasp.



One company that has been making the news lately is Qimonda. They recently bought the rights to use XDR technology from Rambus. Qimonda has stated that they intend to use XDR on video card boards as an alternative to current GDDR3 and GDDR4. There are certain advantages to using an interface like XDR over GDDR in a video card application, but we won’t get into that here. In terms of bandwidth, XDR really does not have too much more offer than current GDDR4 solutions. What we were really interested in from Qimonda is which company they plan to partner with to implement XDR on graphics boards. Will we be seeing XDR on NVIDIA video cards in the near future? What about AMD? Maybe neither. We have a sneaking suspicion that XDR is the solution of choice for an up and coming graphics company. The gentleman we spoke to at the Qimonda booth was an application engineer, and as such he really was not too up to date on what was going on in the news with his company and could not tell us too much about their intentions with XDR. If we have time tomorrow we may go back and gather some more information.



Near the Qimonda booth was Logisys, a company well known for unique enclosures, case mod accessories, and fans. Logisys was proudly displaying two of their full sized plexiglass ATX cases. These cases are completely transparent right down to the power supply, which is also made of plexiglass and manufactured by Logisys. We talked to the Product manager of Logisys about their cases and the conversation ended up on pyramids for one reason or another. Logisys offers a pyramid shaped enclosure for hard drives and such that is meant to be decorative. We suggested that Logisys take that idea and run with it. There are pyramid shaped PCs available already from system integrators like Maingear, but none of them are see-through! We also told Steven that another thing the gaming community would probably love to see is a clear small form factor case to house either proprietary shuttle components or mATX based ones. Such a product would allow gamers to carry around their PCs to LAN parties and be the envy of all their friends. A sharp looking, well lighted, transparent case is sure to make everyone jealous.