CES 2014: NVIDIA, Be Quiet! and PowerColor

In what will likely be one of the last CES 2014 articles, we will cover what NVIDIA had to say as we sat down with a representative and talked about the exciting technology – G-Sync, for monitors and watched an incredible unreleased racing sim/driving game run on three 4K monitors in Surround. We will also show what PowerColor has to done to their AMD line-up to compete with the big boys as well as look at a couple of beautiful new coolers from Be Quiet! Get comfy because it is picture time.

New Technology from NVIDIA

When we first walked into the large, LARGE hall, which is just one third of the Convention Center in Las Vegas, we headed over to where the NVIDIA booth was located. We were greeted by some incredible eye candy in the form of three 4K monitors running the unreleased Project Cars racing sim in all its billion plus of pixel glory. It ran buttery smooth using four GTX Titans.

The G-Sync technology I finally got to see up close, and it really is cool. The image differences between Vsync versus monitors that use the new G-Sync technology/chip (hardware level frame matching, smooth appearance) was like night and day. Check it out at the NVIDIA website.

Another notable item was the Tegra K1 Next-Generation mobile processor. This is a quad-core NVIDIA 4 in 1 ARM-Cortex A15 at 2.3GHz and 192 Kepler cores, which provides up to 4K resolution capability. We saw this application in ‘smart cars’ they had on-site as well, along with many other more common applications with PS4/XB1 like graphics on mobile devices.

NVIDIA was also showing off their hand held SHIELD (powered by the Tegra 4 processor) as well as cloud gaming technology. Lots of bells and whistles this year, most of which really look to improve or change the gaming experience.

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Be Quiet! Heatinks and Power Supplies

From all the way across the pond in Germany, we got to meet a couple of great guys at Be Quiet! We recently started working with them (around a year ago) so it was nice to put a name to a face! We know from reading a couple of Bobnova’s PSU reviews that he loves the build quality and overall end result of the PSU’s they sent for review. We have also reviewed a couple of Be Quiet! heatsinks as well, which also came out positive.

In that light, Be Quiet is coming out with some really good looking and pretty beefy looking coolers. The Dark Rock 3 is new and looks to be a monster with its cubed shape, loads of heatpipes, and fins. The always cool Shadow Rock 2 and Shadow Rock Slim are also pictured.

Be Quiet is also promoting their fan series, the Pure Wings and Silent wings.

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Videos Cards from PowerColor on Display

Last but certainly not least, we had a chance to swing by the PowerColor suite to see what was going on from their AMD based camp. We were greeted with a shelf/nook full of GPUs with their own after market cooling solutions. Everything from the Devil to PCS+ series was on display.

Anything from a R9 270 on up was there for us to have a look at. I was particularly impressed with their cooling solution on the R9 290 and R9 290x. It claims to be 24% cooler and 17% quieter… all things a R9 290 and R9 290x needs to be really. We should see these on store shelves soon, along with the the rest of the Rx 2X0 family with the PowerColor twist on it. We also hope to get a couple of these for review soon, so be sure to keep an eye on the front page!

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Well, that about wraps things up for Overclockers’ CES coverage. I can tell you that Lvcoyote, Mdcomp, and I had a blast hoofing it. And and I do mean hoofing it around the Las Vegas strip to meet our contacts face to face and hear what they have to say about their existing and upcoming products lines.

We also had a chance to meet a lot of our peers at the nightly parties, which seemed to never end (not that it is a problem or anything) and catching our representatives with their ties loosened a bit was awesome. Sadly, we did not have a chance to get much floor time to see all the exciting things CES had to offer outside the scope of PC computing and overclocking. Hopefully the same contingent and more can make it next year so we can continue to bring you even more coverage of CES.

– Joe Shields (Earthdog)