CES 2012 news roundup of the day

ThinkComputers stopped by the Shogun booth at CES 2012 to check out the company’s latest gaming peripherals and accessories. Headlining was a combination mouse, presentation remote, and gaming controller released last year, the Chameleon X1. This laser mouse has a full Playstation Portable-style controller on the bottom of it. Shogun also showed us its several new keyboards, its Ballista mouse, and a fantastic new 2.1 speaker system with golf ball-sized satellites. ThinkComputers’ Colin Dean talks to Dennis from Shogun in this video interview.

Futurelooks stops by the Thermaltake/Tt eSPORTS suite at CES 2012 to grab a drink and see what they have new for gamers and enthusiasts. The breadth and depth of the product lines have really grown and for both brands. For starters, Tt eSPORTS has expanded out to a whole new line of headphones that address the needs of audio enthusiasts to gamers, and they’ve also worked extensively with their top gamers to create two new signature mice. Thermaltake continues along with the introduction of a new Level 10 case for more price sensitive customers and a cooler that they think will go head to head with proven performers like the Noctua NH-D14.

Silverstone Technology made it all the way to North America with a few of their cases destined for the local market. While we normally see them showing off their super high end cases like we did at COMPUTEX 2011, Silverstone decided to bring out products that were a little bit more budget friendly, but still showed off their ability to innovate. Yes, they left that 6 GPU carrying beast back in Taiwan but they still had cool things to offer folks looking for mid-towers and HTPC cases.

Differentiating oneself from all the other memory sellers is a tough game. You can compete on specifications, colours, and even density. But at the end of the day, price is always a factor and with so many players in the game, it’s better to differentiate than to compete head to head with everyone till you’re dead. That’s why even companies that started in memory modules, have decided to differentiate with other product categories. Some have even left the market totally like OCZ. Patriot memory however is trying hard to capture the content creator market and focus on content consumption.

Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock somewhere, you’ve probably noticed that hard drive prices have quadrupled in price and that’s hurt everyone from end users to system builders. But that hasn’t stopped Seagate from forging ahead and continuing to innovate. We stop by their secret meeting area in the Vdara Hotel in Las Vegas during CES 2012 to find out what they were doing to bring prices back to normal and to check out some of their new products for both PC and Mac users.

Zalman showed off its new coolers, including air coolers such as the entry-level 10X Optima and the high-end, first of its kind 12X, a triple-fan cooler, as well as its all-in-one liquid cooling solutions. We also looked at the new case, the Z11, which has two models and has a sleek, “alien” ship look about it. Zalman also displayed its latest line of power supplies, three levels of SSDs, mice, and video cards with built-in Zalman coolers. Colin Dean speaks to Jeff from Zalman in this video interview.

Check out Rosewill's Thor V2 or Blackhawk cases, their latest laptop cooling solutions, or even their Cherry MX Switch Mechanical Keyboards at CES 2012.

“We headed over to the LVH (Las Vegas Hilton) for our meeting with enthusiast case manufacturer SilverStone where we stumbled upon perhaps the most interesting chassis of the week. Their new Mini-ITX FT03-Mini is nearly identical externally to the original FT03 except that it supports a smaller form factor and the optical drive is mounted vertically which looks a bit odd on the silver version. The SilverStone rep described it as the SG05 turned vertically which we can totally relate to.”