NVIDIA and Digital Storm

NVIDIA

NVIDIA was doing one thing this year and that was showing off 3D. Since AMD had launched their 6800 series the day prior to Blizzcon I couldn't help prodding one of the representatives about it. The response was a little suprising because it involved an evasion of the question and an expression of optimism about Intel's Sandy Bridge. It would seem that NVIDIA is hoping that Intel can start to put the hurt on AMD in the budget CPU market and push them out of the market (and thus taking AMD's GPUs with them). Not sure how realistic that idea is, but it certainly was an interesting conversation. NVIDIA may not have wanted to talk video cards but some of the other hardware vendors were not quite so discrete by the way and I received confirmation of the GTX 580 and was given a release date of the second week in November by one of the other vendors at Blizzcon. So with that out of the way let's see what NVIDIA had to show. The most impressive thing at the booth had to be their 103" (yes, you read that right!) plasma TV for their main display.

Also on show were several NVIDIA surround set ups.

And just for fun here's another impressive case powering another of NVIDIA's 3D demos.

DIGITAL STORM

Tucked into the NVIDIA booth, Digital Storm was showing off their up and coming monster of a system, the Digital Storm Syndicate.

A custom case from Mountain Mods, dual Intel hexa-cores, Quad-SLI GeForce GTX 480s, 12 GB of OCZ RAM, dual radiators featuring what they're calling Stage 6 liquid cooling and 1500 Watt Silverstone PSU. All this can be yours for a price yet to be determined (but northwards of $6500 USD). Also featured (and driving that 103" plasma TV) was Digital Storm BlackHawk Hailstorm, based on a modified Corsair 800D chassis, have a look.