CeBIT 2007: bit-tech Hardware Roundup

With Innovtek’s help, EVGA showed off its fully watercooled Nvidia nForce 680i SLI motherboard to us. The northbridge, southbridge, voltage regulation and CPU are all sexed up with waterblocks, and the kit is due to come as a whole with a warranty. We’ve no idea of the cost yet or even if the standard 10-year EVGA warranty applies, but it’ll certainly be far more convenient than buying it all separately before voiding your warranty.

MSI P6N SLI Platinum works in a 75°C oven

MSI demonstrated that its P6N SLI Platinum (based on Nvidia's nForce 650i SLI chipset) is capable of running at an elevated case temp of 75°C. This was all despite having only passively cooled Corsair Dominator memory and motherboard heatpipes.

So even if you want to run your system entirely passively, you live in Saudi Arabia, or your case hasn’t seen a vacuum cleaner since the Millennium, you should be fine. We currently have our own P6N SLI Platinum in the labs, and whilst our offices rarely reach these lethal temperatures, we will put it through our own torture testing and have a full review of the board for you very soon.

Nvidia nForce 650i SLI

Inno3D was showing off its new nForce 650i SLI board at CeBIT. This board features three PCI-Express x16 slots. We're pretty sure that the outside pair of PCIe x16 slots are hard-locked with eight lanes each, while the middle slot is a combination of the two and allows you to run a single card at the full x16 bandwidth if there is nothing in the slots either side of it. The memory slots might pose a bit of a problem, but the location of the 24-pin ATX connector is likely to be more problematic.

Nvidia GeForce 7050 and 7025

The new Nvidia Integrated graphics range is due for release soon and includes an updated integrated GeForce 7-series graphics core. The specifications are expected to match those of AMD’s 690G, with integrated HDCP support and a tailoring towards HD video playback. The chipset is a single chip solution, unlike the AMD variant, and is officially being referred to as a "GeForce" rather than an "nForce" like most other Nvidia motherboard chipsets, since this features a graphics engine.

MSI was displaying its GeForce 7050 board (featuring HDMI) at the show. It has a tiny passive northbridge heatsink, which indicates it’s a very cool running chipset indeed unlike some of Nvidia's previous chipsets. Also, there are PCI-Express x16 and x1 slots, two PCI slots, four SATA 3Gbps, 8-channel HD audio, Gigabit Ethernet, two DDR2 memory slots and support for Intel's Core 2 processors.

Abit also had both varieties on its stand: the AN-M2HD and AN-M2 which are GeForce 7050 and 7025 respectively. Both use the mATX form factor and support socket AM2 processors. Also, the two look virtually the same, with the differentiating factor being that the AN-M2HD has a gold plated HDMI port.