14 DAY TRIAL // It has become somewhat of a habit among the developers of various computer components to come up with some pretty unique machines for the various fairs they're attending throughout the year, designed especially to attract the visitors to their booths. And this also happened at this year's CeBIT, where Foxconn is exhibiting two very attractive water-cooled systems, capable of delivering some pretty amazing computing power.
First and foremost, it's important to note that these things feature some extremely eye-catching cases, designed to resemble the head of Transformer (at least from a certain angle). However, the internal components are equally impressive, because, as you can see from the photo, this extremely high-tech rig is built around one of Foxconn's mainboards and is powered by a Core 2 extreme CPU.
The P45-based motherboard packs almost everything but the kitchen sink. It is built with AMD components and provides the user with four 4-inch PCIe Gen2.0 x 8 that can be used for connecting up to 8 independent displays, powered by 4 graphics cards. However, four high-end graphics cards will severely impact the system's electric stability, and that's why the board comes with two PSU connectors.
The cooling solution is also extremely interesting, and sports the "required" heatpipe that renders a motherboard as "worth mentioning" on the enthusiast market. The cooling system is a proprietary recipe including fully water-cooled assembly for NB, SB and VRM, with a flexible water connection interface via I/O for easy integration with water-cooling systems.
More than that, the prototype sports a thermoelectric cooler in the Peltier style for the Northbridge, that cools it down to 10 Celsius degrees below the ambient temperature. This is an extreme prototype that comes with the Quantum Force OC panel: a 5.25-inch interface bay that reports system information. System integrators can now go green with envy, thanks to the programmable LED lights on the PCB for enhanced visual effects.
The company does not plan to mass-manufacture the P45 motherboard in the sample configuration, given the fact that it will come with quite a price tag. The F1 test shuttle was powered by four Radeon HD3870 boards, that allows the system to drive up to ten displays running at blaring resolutions. The video demonstration has been performed via Microsoft's Flight Simulator X
Since this machine has been created basically for demonstration purposes, it's very unlikely that you'll be able to find it anywhere in stores. However, given the fact that the components are not that difficult to come by (if you've got the money), then re-creating this very interesting setup could actually be possible.
Live report by Bogdan Popa and Alex Vochin from CeBIT 2008 Hanover, Germany.
