 Here we are at the XFX booth. This is going to be the start of our second round of booth showcases. They have a whole bunch of really cool stuff on demo, including like this funky music. So XFX is best known for their video cards. They made a little bit of a switcheroo a couple generations ago, where they used to do GeForce cards, where now they're focused entirely on Radeon cards. So they have brought their years of experience designing and manufacturing graphics cards, as well as the sweet coolers that go with them. Sorry, Slick says it's a little low. And two, over to the Radeon side. So they have an immense variety of different cards, including reference cards, cards with non-reference coolers, overclocked version of their cards. So if you're going to go with a graphics card for the Radeon side, actually it's hard to make a better choice than XFX, because not only do they build the cards incredibly well, they have one of the best warranties in the biz as well. Which isn't to say that graphics cards are the only things that they do. This, I don't know if you guys have seen this episode on my NCIX Tech Tips channel, but I actually showcased this guy right here. This is their triple monitor stand, which is capable of mounting up to three 24-inch monitors, either in landscape or portrait mode, for the most balls-to-the-walls, by-affinity setup that you can get, without spending a fortune on a custom solution like the Samsung MDT series. Last but not least, we have a fairly new addition to XFX's lineup. So this is their Pro Series power supplies. They actually have power supplies ranging from 80-plus bronze, all the way up to their limited edition 1000 watt, 80-plus platinum 1000 watt. And if you guys are following my personal rig upgrades on my Linus Tech Tips channel, you'll probably already know that I'm actually custom-sleeving one of those with individually sleeved cables, and that is what I have opted to use for a couple of reasons. Number one is that it has the best efficiency on the market, and number two is their hybrid silent fan switch. All you've got to do is flip that switch, and your fan on your power supply doesn't even turn on until you hit about 500 watts load, which means it's 100% silent, unless you're in a max load gaming scenario. We're here at the Avik booth, where they have a variety of different professional types of products, so check this out. These are designed to basically clip to a shirt pocket, or to the inside of a notebook, or even on your pants pocket. You can see I'm sporting one right now. These are meant to replace your long, bulky cables that have the potential to get broken or lost more easily. These you can clip somewhere, keep them safe, they're 100% durable, and they're not long. So that's a dummy, so that's not going to fit in there at all, but that's not really the point. The point is that it will fit in a real one. And then there's also a variety of other things. So you've got USB-A to mini, as well as USB-A to micro-B. We've also got a couple other products. So this is their notebook stand, which is made out of... Highlight? Highlight, thank you. Which folds up like this, and then you can reassemble it... Like that. Bam. And finally, last but not least, they've got a line of iPad cases that actually uses a composite aluminum on the back, so it feels like you're actually still holding an iPad, and they're compatible with the smart cover. So you just clip your smart cover on here, and then you are pretty much completely protected as far as your iPad goes. We also have one more product here. Portable charging station. Aha, portable charging station. So this actually sits here, it plugs into here. This activates the hub. You can charge up to three devices at one time. That's 15 watts of power, enables charging of iPad, iPhone, Blackberry, or any other Bluetooth headset. Anything that's USB charging-enabled. Awesome, there you go. And you keep that in a handy little carrying pouch here so that you don't lose anything. If you're traveling, you're enrolled all the time, you just have one thing to plug into the wall, all your cables are right here, you're ready to go. Good stuff. Here we are at the MSI booth, where the main focus is military class 3. So the military class 3 concept basically revolves around using the highest quality, most stable possible components to design their cards and their motherboards. So military class 3 doesn't actually refer to some of their other concepts, such as, this doesn't balance unless you have a graphics card on it, there we go, such as their TwinFrozer 3 coolers. So right here we have their GTX 580, although they do have next generation products coming with their custom coolers. So the advantage of a TwinFrozer cooler is that rather than a reference design, which will usually load around 75 to 80 degrees, TwinFrozer coolers can keep even high end graphics cards at around 55 degrees under load. So while you do have a little bit more exhaustive heat in your system, you get significantly better temperatures on your graphics card, which is great if you're going to overclock your video card. On the motherboard side, MSI has a full line up of products, including everything from basic G41 LGA 775 legacy stuff, all the way up to the very latest LGA 2011 and LGA 1155 motherboard platforms. So there, aha, Z77 motherboard is actually the main focus of the booth here today, and it's a feature called OC Genie. Now I've demoed OC Genie on my channels before, but I'm going to summarize it really quick for you. OC Genie actually over clocks and tunes your whole system for optimal performance with the push of one button. And what's really neat about the new OC Genie on Z77 is the fact that you can customize your OC Genie profile. So say, for example, if you were a system builder like NCIX, you could design a system to OC Genie to be even more aggressive on that particular system. You give it to the end user and you say, hey, you want to overclock your system to the max? Just press this button and it's already all completely set up for you. You want to turn off the overclock, you want to save a little bit on the power consumption, whatever else, press the button, turn it off. No big deal. So we've gone there. Z77A-GD65, which in my experience is actually one of the easiest Z77 boards to work with in terms of overclocking and in terms of BIOS navigation with their click BIOS 2. Welcome to the OCZ Technology booth. You can see they got their OCZ logo going on here. So OCZ used to be mostly known for memory products. They are now no longer involved in system memory. However, they have gone into SSDs in a big way. So this was actually my suggestion. Yeah, I'm going to take full credit for it. I'm getting like the stink eye over there, but it was totally my idea. My suggestion was that in order to demo the value of an SSD, they bring two identical systems. And we're not even talking high performance systems. I mean, these are DELs. It's not a custom NCIX PC by any stretch of the imagination. No matter what kind of a PC you're using, whether it's a netbook or an extreme gaming machine, you will see a huge benefit from an SSD. Now you can do the usual boot up demo, but I think we've all seen that before. What I want to focus on is the general responsiveness of a system using an SSD. So you guys at this time don't know which of these systems has a regular laptop hard drive and which of them has an SSD. But I bet you know now. Look how long it takes to launch Windows Media Player versus this one. Bear in mind guys too, these are fresh installs on these machines with nothing running in the background. Hey, that one was pretty close. Let's go find something else that hasn't been opened before. Oh, Windows Media Center. That's a good one. The more you load up these machines with various applications and antivirus running in the background and all that kind of nonsense, the more pronounced this difference is going to become. And I'm going to have to find a way to keep talking here while we wait for this hard drive machine to finally launch Windows Media Center. These are two brand new machines. I have not tampered with them in any way. We're not even talking Photoshop. We're not talking complicated applications. Windows Media Center takes like five times longer to launch on a hard drive than it does on an SSD. So if you guys didn't already know, yes, this is the one with the OCZ Vertex 4. And if you do happen to attend the show, you can get one for only $127.99. This is the highest performing SSD on the market. It is pretty much right up their tide for that performance crown right now. And at this price, it is the best performance per dollar per gig that you can buy. Welcome to the PS VitaBoot here at the NCIX Tech Fair. This is actually my first time hands-on with the PS Vita. So it uses a 960 by 544 screen that is almost 1080p. So it's pretty darn close. This is their full replacement for the PSP. So it is their latest generation handheld gaming platform. And I've got to say, even launch titles look absolutely fantastic. It has dual analog sticks, which means that you can play your games the way you're accustomed to. Whether it's movement with the left and camera with the right, or whether the game dev screws up and doesn't do it that way, you will be able to operate your games the way that you're accustomed. You've also got a D-pad as well as your full PlayStation controls. And based on how complete the control set is on here, I wouldn't be that surprised if Sony decided to make PS1 games or something available on an arcade in the past. Because I can tell you, these graphics are more comparable to PS2 than to PS1, that's for sure. In terms of the overall build quality, it's got a nice overall feel to it without being too heavy. You've got L and R buttons here, so you don't have quite as many shoulder buttons as you might be used to on a Sony product. However, this is pretty cool. It has a touchpad on the back, which the game devs are free to use in any way they want. So you can program it to be like R2, R3, L2, L3. For example, in soccer, you can aim where you want to do a free kick at the goal, according to where you press on the back pad. So there's all kinds of neat stuff like that. Let's just have a look at one of the other launch titles where they've got one of the golf games going on here. So let's press X to take the shot. Yeah, yeah. Okay, apparently I didn't take the shot. Okay, I'm taking that shot. There we go. Sorry, I'm not much of a console guy here, guys. I get confused easily. Oh, it's right in the water. Excellent. So that pretty much wraps up this round two of vendor boots. Don't forget to check us out at the NCIX Tech Fair and don't forget to subscribe to Linus and NCIX Tech Tips.