Easily the coolest thing ASUS had on display was its XG Station. The XG Station acts as a means to use discreet, full sized graphics cards, or discreet anything cards for that matter, on a laptop which obviously cannot accommodate such devices itself. The enclosure has space for two riser cards and connects to the computer through an ExpressCard 34, which runs pretty much as PCI-E x1. This is one of the first devices of its kind and represents one of the only major innovations in the motherboard/expandability market in quite a while. It also looks amazingly nice. The final thing we saw at ASUS was an ultra-portable laptop. This is a pretty big change of pace from ASUS, who typically makes generic-looking and performing notebook computers. They have recently ventured into the areas of ultra-portability and ultra-performance, and their new notebook is hopefully a sign of more exciting things to come.


Our second to last stop in the South Hall on day 3 was with Cooler Master. Cooler Master was one of only a few companies to have several new things on display. The first thing they had was a revised version of their notebook cooler. This notebook cooler is really nothing more than a well-engineered inclined plane surface to improve laptop ventilation. The cooler is entirely passive, meaning there are no fans to make excessive amounts of noise. They then showed us a new external hard drive enclosure with eSATA. It appeared to be a well designed enclosure that was extremely easy to install. The demo we saw had the hard drive just literally drop into the enclosure, at which point it was good to go. We were in a hurry at the time so we didn’t get to investigate as thoroughly as we wanted. Another thing Cooler Master had on display was two of their PCs, the Mystique 632 and the Stacker 830, that were given an EXTREMELY DETAILED custom paint job. These were some absolutely amazing cases that were designed in tandem with a system integrator called Smooth Creations.


Cooler Master also released a new lineup of VGA coolers at CES. With the latest video cards using up as much as 300 Watts of power, stock coolers are becoming more and more inadequate. There is only so much you can do to cool a video card, which is why Cooler Master has released their own models.