TRN's Weekly Review, CES 2014 Highlights

Seeing as over the past week CES 2014 has been going on in Las Vegas I though that I would make this weeks weekly review a CES special and share with you what I thought the highlights of 2014 were. While I was not able to attend CES 2014, I have been following it and have found some it very it interesting while most of it not very interesting.
While there was a lot of focus on new 4k televisions with curved and bendable displays this year at CES 2014 this was not the most interesting thing to do with 4k that came out of CES for me. There has been much speculation saying that Nvidia's G-Sync will only be compatible with 1080p TN panels which disappointed a lot of people; however, this was certainly proved untrue by Nvidia as they had a Asus 4k display with a G-Sync module attached running a real world scenario in a game. This is certainly good news for both monitor and gaming enthusiasts a like in the near future they could be seeing the beauty that is 4k combined with G-Sync which will mean no screen tearing along with all of the other benefits of G-Sync. At the demo you were actually able to switch between using G-Sync, V-sync, or neither and the difference was apparently remarkable; with V-Sync there was no screen tearing but big drops in frame rate, with nothing on there was large screen tearing and drops in frame rate, but with G-Sync there was no screen tearing and the frame rate remained at 60 fps throughout.  

Carrying on with PC related things revealed at CES Corsair released a few new interesting things including some new cases. The most interesting was the 760T. The most interesting thing about this case was full acrylic side panel window to really show off your set up and the hardware that you have inside of your rig. The chassis of the case is based upon the 750D, which in itself was a great case, and it maintains almost all of the 750D features. This means that it can be used for a fully custom water loop as it supports a 360mm rad in the top, 240mm rad in the front, and then 120mm rads in the bottom and back. If you are not a fan of that full acrylic window then you can buy the 730T case which is the same but without the window. I think this is a really good looking case with lots of potential for water cooling as well as many things.

One of the more funny things to happen at CES was Michael Bay going off stage mid-way through the Samsung TV presentation. Samsung probably thought that they had hit the jackpot when they got Michael Bay to endorse their new televisions at CES but boy were they wrong. After a Teleprompter fail mid way during his speech Michael Bay said that he would "wing it". Well after a few awkward silences Michael Bay clearly could not take any more of it and walked off stage apologising. I personally think that this was rather amusing but did not look good on Samsung's behalf.

The main focus on CES, alongside with televisions, was were able technology. The amount of coverage that I have seen on Smart Watches, fitness bands, and smart bands was ridiculous so I just talk about one of them, the Pebble Steel Watch. The Pebble Steel has changed the aesthetics completely of the original Pebble and also changed some of the hardware, for example the old Pebble charge will not work with the new Pebble. The main thing about the Pebble Steel is that it is made out of stainless steel. This lends itself to more formal wear than the original Pebble but I personally am not a fan of the new aesthetic.

As a PC enthusiast the most exciting thing to come out of CES 2014 was Project Christine. This Razer's attempt at a fully modular PC. It is nowhere near being complete but what we have seen so far looks amazing. They have a wonderful industrial design going on with many different modules over the whole case, if you can call it a case. One of the most amazing things about it is that it completely oil cooled which makes it incredibly quiet. Because it is oil cooled no fans are required meaning that it can be so quiet. If this were to come to market it will allow so many more people to get into upgrading their PC who had not before because they were too afraid to open their PC. I personally think that this is an amazing idea but will not be with us for a few years unfortunately.

Thank you for reading my highlights of CES 2014, I hope you enjoyed it and if you did please share it on Facebook and Twitter and if you want follow me on Twitter here:
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