CES 2016 Coverage Round-Up

A new year brings a new trade-show, where the gadget loving world goes crazy as 200,000 people descend upon Vegas. CES is where we get to see this year’s upcoming product announcements and cool tech demos that are sure to find their way into your hands in the near future. From new phones, peripherals, audio systems, home automation, Internet-of-things, and a heap load of VR. While the usual assortment of TVs and supercars will be present, it’s all things gadgety and PC related that get us excited.

Over the next few days as the CES event unfolds, we’ll be listing out the highlights each day. New product announcements, company plans, expectations for the future, and anything cool; this will give you a quick overview of what you may have missed, as well as some of the product overviews we posted on social media.

Day 5

AMD already a spot in the limelight earlier in the week at CES 2016, with its announcement around the new Polaris architecture that’ll set the ground work for the transition to FinFET and 14-16nm manufacture process in its new GPUs.

But that’s not all, in what can be best described as a footnote at the end of a long announcement list, AMD’s next generation of CPUs and APUs will be ditching the multi-socket approach to its motherboards. Instead, a single socket, AM4, will be taking over; you won’t need to get two different motherboards for different processors. Regarding the current generation, the stock cooler in new CPUs will be replaced with a much more efficient and quieter cooler, named Wraith. Full details as well as other announcements from AMD can be found in the news post.

Tom, doing Techgage proud at Gibson guitars, showing his musical triumph… probably.

Cooler Master had a huge collection of new gear at CES 2016, that’ll be making its way to our grubby hands over the next year. A smart PSU that’s completely modular, complete with its own app for monitoring power levels. A modular chassis concept that lets you swap out parts. The usual assortment of new peripherals, with all the bling you can muster.

Then there are various fans and water-cooling products, including an open-loop DIY that’s built for its new MasterCase chassis, a closed-loop AIO for simplicity; new fans for high-volume, high-pressure and balanced airflow; and finally, a new tower CPU cooler with vapor chambers. Click the picture or follow the link here for more details.

Day 4

Carrying on with things from last night, we start off with a few press releases, as well as a closer look at some cool gear from SteelSeries and Corsair. While we’re over half way through the event, there’s still plenty to talk about and companies to meet at CES 2016.

Greg managed to get some words with SteelSeries, and play around with a very unique mouse that’ll be hitting the market soon – the Rival 700. It has a little OLED screen on the side of the mouse that supports custom pictures and even animations. There is also some tactile feedback with little vertical motors that let you feel impacts and low-ammo warnings – without disrupting your aim. Replaceable covers let’s you personalize the mouse, and for the hardcore, a replaceable sensor module.

While we posted about Corsair’s new chassis earlier in the week, JD managed to stop by its booth and get some details on the new goods, including a close-up on the Bulldog SFF for system builders. Some tiny little SFF power supplies were on show too. I still get excited over desktops the size of a book (admittedly a large book) with the power to render 4K games.

Also, Synology released details on the latest NAS that’ll be coming out in the coming week – a mainstream targeted 4-bay NAS for those on a tighter budget, the DS416j. It’s an update to the DS414j, with a new CPU, hardware encryption and Synology’s comprehensive software suite. It’s not for the enterprise market, and it can’t do 4K video transcoding, but it’s still a capable entry-level 4-bay NAS.

There were a couple big announcements from Intel, with line refreshes for the Compute Stick and the NUC. These are introductions of Skylake for mobile processors, rather than desktops. The Compute Stick received a bit of an overhaul in general, as it not only got a new Atom CPU, but also Core M3 and M5 versions too. The wireless chipset was completely replaced, as the original used a third-party provider, while the new one is all Intel. Full details in the news post.

As for the NUC, while externals will appear the same, the overhaul to the interior will likely bring about a renewed interest in these darling little PCs. While the CPU is upgraded, so to is the GPU, and with the i5 variant comes the Iris 540 graphics. Intel has really upped its game in the GPU department this time around, and these new NUCs should prove to be quite the competent 4K streamer, and mild games machines. There are currently rumors of an i7 variant, although Intel is remaining tight lipped on the matter. Again, full details in the news post.

Day 3

Lots of big news out today, as Oculus takes center stage, practically stealing the news focus as it announces pre-orders and pricing on its first official, consumer-ready VR headset, the Rift. Be prepared for the rather heft price tag, especially since it doesn’t include the Oculus Touch controllers either. All eyes are now staring at HTC/Valve for an update on the Vive.

QNAP had something special up its sleeve, as it shows off a portable NAS it calls a ‘NASBook‘. Take a high-end enterprise NAS, remove the 3.5-inch hard drive bays, and put four(!) M.2 SATA slots inside, complete with HDMI and USB 3.0 ports for extended connectivity and HD video surveillance. This going to be an interesting NAS to review.

Patriot announces its plans for it’s first NVMe based SSD storage, what it calls its Hellfire range. These include an M.2 drive with 2.5GB/s reads and 600MB/s writes, and a PCIe Add-In-Card (AIC) with a massive 3,000MB/s sequential reads and a blistering 2,200MB/s writes. Definitely one to get on the test bench.

Kingston, our dear sponsor for this year’s CES, also had a number of interesting products. A new DataTraveler was announced with a physical pin number entry pad to help keep the USB drive secure. A new enterprise based SSD, the KC400, which includes hardware based ECC data correction that’s active on reads and writes, to help with sudden power failure. Lastly, Kingston showed off it’s MobileLite update with the G3 and Pro, allowing you to share data wirelessly to various devices, charge up a mobile, and act as a router if a LAN cable is plugged in.

And now for something cool, holographics with 3D LEDs!

We’ll have more details on this a little later, stay tuned.

JD and Tom managed to catch up with Corsair and have a look at some of its new chassis designs we covered earlier this week. Nice to see the Bulldog getting some face time too.

Patriot had a busy day as well. We initially covered its latest SSD Hellfire update above, but we managed to catch up with them in person, and see some of the other stuff on display. While there is the usual assortment of RAM, flash storage and SSDs, they also had a few peripherals on offer, and some PCs built with the help from Antec and Enermax.

Greg King managed to get some face-time with TRENDnet, and saw that it had two new items coming out soon; an AC2600 StreamBoost MU-MIMO router, and the AC1900 USB adapter. Higher speeds, more bandwidth, greater coverage, faster processing, all the good stuff we’ve come to expect. Head on over to the news post to read more.

With the end of the day, there be a small party and dinner with other members of the press, as well as some indulgences – it is Vegas after all. We take in some of the views and iconic scenes – ready to hit the convention centers again tomorrow. More to come as we continue our coverage of CES 2016.

Day 2

A couple key events were covered, details of which to come soon. However, it’s the usual deluge of press releases. What really took off for a storm was a massive collection of new and upcoming products from firm-favorite, ASUS.You can read about the huge variety of releases in the press release below, as it covers the 10th anniversary of ASUS’ ROG brand.

There there were a number of new motherboards, as well as some novel products such as an external GPU dock for its laptops, and more information on the GX700 Laptop, sporting the company’s first external water-cooling dock that allows the laptop to overclock aggressively (not to mention the inclusion of a desktop variant of the GTX 980 GPU).

For a picture preview of the ASUS event, we’ve published an album on Facebook for you to glance over. More pictures to come later on.

Intel was on scene too, with a rather large stage presense, and there will be details from the team’s time at Digital Experience later on.

Day 1

Most of the action is taking place on the main event floor, where a lot of the more mainstream companies will be taking up residence. Our familiar tech companies won’t be holding their events until later in the week. As such, most of the cool stuff will be through press releases, as tasters for things to come.

Later in the day, CES Unveiled kicked off, where we managed to catch up with some of the extremely busy PR reps. There’s still the whole week ahead of us, as we try and catch up with as many companies as possible. For the first day, we’ll cover some of the important press releases, as well as a tour of CES Unveiled.

AMD’s Latest Generation GPU Architecture: Polaris

After a long delay, AMD begins to divulge information on its new 4th generation GCN GPU architecture: Polaris. With it comes improvements to data handling, power efficiency, new hardware features, and a design overhaul for smaller manufacture processes; 14-16nm FinFET.

Corsair Unveils New Chassis – SPEC-ALPHA and Carbide 400 Series

Corsair is putting its best foot forward this year at CES with an impressive offering of new cases that are sure to please the eye of even the most discriminating PC enthusiast. The SPEC-ALPHA sports three 120mm fans for Direct Airflow Path cooling, controlled by a three-speed switch on the case’s front bezel. The Carbide 400 series are mid-towers with a compact design and sound dampening, while keeping the classic, ease of use that Corsair is famous for.

NVIDIA Announces VR-Ready Program For PC Builders And Add-In Cards

It looks as if 2016 will be the year of VR, with a number of vendors releasing headsets in the coming months (Oculus Rift, HTC Vive). As a result, NVIDIA will be starting an initiative to help consumers spot systems that are ready for VR with a new badge bundled with select GTX graphics cards.

MAINGEAR Unveils ALPHA 34 – A 34-Inch Curved All-In-One PC

Desktops are so passé, that giant tower on the floor or hidden away in a cupboard can take up a lot of space, leaving less room for things that matter – like a giant 34-inch ultra-wide 4K curved display. So MAINGER took said display, and bolted every imaginable high-end desktop component inside of, including either an Intel 8-Core Extreme Edition CPU, or if you’re feeling adventurous, and 18-Core Xeon.

CES Unveiled

Over at CES Unveiled, we came across a whole bunch of new tech to do with home automation, instruments that teach you to play, as well as some favorites. Synology showed off it’s new DS716+ NAS, capable of transcoding 4K movie streams over the network, and it’s very first router, the RT1900AC – both of which we loosely covered when DSM 6.0 was announced.

Plenty of other gear was on show, including central air monitoring from Ecovent that lets you control the vents, and thus temperature, in each room of the house, so you are no longer forced to set a temperature for the entire house. Lowes also has a set of home automation equipment worth checking out too.

D-Link had a whole assortment of routers, range extenders and other ancillary equipment worth checking out. Blink showed off some wireless cameras for security and monitoring, that can last up to a year on a single pair of AA Lithium batteries.

All this tech talk making you sleepy, but you want some tunes to listen to with disturbing your other half? SleepPhones may be what you are looking for; a flat headband that wraps around your ears with little speakers, so as to not dig in to your head while it lays atop a pillow.

You can check out the rest in our CES Unveiled Round-Up Article, if you missed something.