 Welcome to Linus Tech Tips at CES 2013. Our trip to the show this year is powered by Corsair, maker of quality PC components and peripherals. Our trusted storage partner is Seagate Technology, and our trusted networking partner is Linksys. The Quickfire is already Cooler Master's most popular mechanical keyboard, but that doesn't mean they're gonna stop changing things about it. And I don't mean changing things like randomly changing things that aren't necessarily good things. I mean making changes that have been asked for. So you see, this is an older version. This has sort of CM Storm branding here. It has CM Storm branding sort of over here on the right by the arrow keys. It's got some CM Storm branding on the top of the keyboard. The feedback from gamers that Cooler Master received was, look, we like these premium mechanical keyboards. They're awesome. We love the Quickfire, but what we don't like is having branding all over it. We want a cleaner look. So they introduced sort of the newer revision which has a very, very, a very, very plain, very clean look as well as just a small CM Storm logo up here at the top. Now, this is an existing product, so this is nothing that new. The Quickfire Stealth, on the other hand, changes the Quickfire making it, again, even cleaner. So moving the writing to the side of the key like this does a couple of things. Number one is it makes the keyboard look extremely stealthy and very cool from the top. And number two is it actually increases the durability of the keys themselves. So even though they're laser etched, there is still the eventual chance that the writing can wear down or it can become less visible. But because of the way that they've done this, it is actually absolutely impossible. So no matter how greasy or oily or cheeto stained your fingers are, you are not going to be able to affect the way the typing appears on the keyboard. Now this guy over here is new. This is basically a longer version of the Quickfire. This is the XT which stands for extension or extended or extreme tactile or whatever you want it to stand for. Basically, this is a full 104 key layout, so you get the number pad in addition to everything you already like about the Quickfire. One thing that's missing from the Quickfire is the cable routing here at the bottom. So the reason for that is that they've actually decreased, there you go, they've decreased the profile of the keyboard. It is 28mm at its thickest and 18mm at its thinnest, making it the thinnest mechanical keyboard using Cherry MX switches on the market. They've also added, and I believe, oh shoot, I think I missed something over here. Ah yes, okay, I missed something on both of these. So they've added an 8X polling rate option to both the Stealth and the XT that makes it the fastest input available for a mechanical keyboard, which is, if you're looking for every little competitive edge, obviously a factor for you. So right, instead of the cable routing on the bottom, they've just gone with a full-sized USB port, although they are going to implement it a little bit differently, I think, on the final model where it'll be kind of coming out at an angle so it's a little bit easier to route. While the four types of Cherry MX switches that we're most familiar with are blues, browns, reds, and blacks, there are actually other kinds of switches from Cherry. Well, some of the reasons that we haven't seen these as often is maybe they aren't as ideal, so maybe people don't like them as much, or maybe they're more expensive and companies haven't wanted to implement them. Now Cooler Master's taking almost every model they have and throwing a whole bunch of different switch types at it because their idea is that, look, we're not going to say, okay, you're a typist, you want blues, you're a gamer, you want reds. We're going to say, you're a whoever you are and you want whatever you want and go for it. So this is the Trigger Green. This is the first fully MX green keyboard that I have ever encountered and both Slick and I are in perfect agreement that it is, without a doubt, pretty much as good as it gets. It feels like a heavier blues, so it has an 80-gram spring in it, and what that means is, as you push down, two things. It eliminates a bit of the double tap issue that you have with blues where the actuation point is actually a little bit before the click, so you don't have that audible feedback for the actuation point on a blue. Here they line up much more closely and it also gives you more, well, more resistance and more push back, so it feels more like a buckling spring. If you've ever used a Model M, this is as close as it gets with a Cherry MX key switch without you having to sort of find an old Model M on eBay or something along those lines. Now it's got some of the customizability that we've seen with other Cooler Master keyboards, so you can change the mode of the keys, you've got breathing, you've got a gaming mode that lights up your arrow keys, you can adjust the brightness, you can turn the LEDs off outright. But what I think is the coolest feature about it is the fact that you can fully program any key. So if you decide, okay, I want a Windows key over here, I don't want a Storm key, you reprogram that to a Windows key. It has a few macro profiles as well, profile keys, and if you decide, okay, I want my delete key here, then you can do that. The only key on the keyboard that cannot be reprogrammed is the one right here. I also really like the implementation of the wrist rest here. I know that large wrist rests sometimes don't look as sexy as a very small compact wrist rest, but I can tell you guys right now that for some people, my wife being one of them, she refuses to type on anything that doesn't have a wrist rest about this big. So the only keyboard out there for her is a Steelseries 7G. As soon as I get my hands on one of these, I'm going to get her to try and see what she thinks, because she's a much faster typist than me. She does about 145 words per minute, and she's kind of one of my go-to people. But Slick is the only one I have here you'll have to do for today, Slick. And he says, sounds great, I love it too. These products don't actually exist yet. This code name Lux or something like that, and they're sort of referred to as the Cooler Master, CM Storm, Aluminum Series or something. What they are is they're kind of a concept that they're working on right now for customizable keyboards. Now, you might have seen back in the day, I think there was, I forget who it was, but they were custom painting Logitech G15s. I can tell you guys right now, the finish you're going to get painting something like made of plastic is never going to be as good as you can do with something metal. Also, the fact that you can't take them apart makes it much more difficult to do. You have to have more specialized equipment, and it's just, it's never going to look as good. So what they've done is they've integrated aluminum metal aspects into a full range of gaming peripherals here. So we've got a headset that has two removable plates, one on each side that allow you to take it off. You can paint it, you can color it, you can take it off completely if you want it to look kind of goofy, but that's totally up to you is sort of the point. There's also a keyboard that has the entire top plate removable, so you want to put your favorite game graphic. Let's say you're a partner of Cooler Masters. You want to release a game branded keyboard, or even you want to do like a cool giveaway. So you grab a few of these, you send them to a sweet paint shop, you get some really cool airbrushing done on them, boom, you're done. So it's pretty much meant to be a template for the easiest to customize peripherals. There's also a mouse and a mouse pad, so you can see here's the aluminum plate on this guy. This is full aluminum, and while I probably don't think I'd recommend painting a mouse pad, I guess you'd have the option if you really want to. The last thing I missed here before was the control RX. And what's cool about this guy is it's, sorry, polyurethane back, correct? Polyurethane back, and it's very, very thick. So this is great for LAN parties where you don't always get your own table, and sometimes you're stuck on sort of the butt crack between the tables. So what you could do is you take this, and at least, as long as you don't have a huge lip, you're going to have a reasonably smooth surface, bridging that gap because it's so thick and because the back is so stiff. It's also extremely sticky, probably the most grippy back I've ever felt on a mouse pad. And I think that pretty much wraps it up for CM Storm, so they've got a lot of exciting stuff going on. Don't miss any of our CES 2013 coverage by making sure you're subscribed to Linus Tech Tips. Not content to just make PC cases anymore, Cooler Master has on display at CES a fairly wide range of Apple accessories. So I want to start with the Rock. Basically, it's a sort of no-frills, nice, heavy, I mean, the name is appropriate because it feels and looks about like a rock, except like a more of a glossy, elegant rock. And the idea is you take your iPad, or I don't know, presumably you could even chuck an iPhone there if you felt like it. There you go, you could do that. Or you take your MacBook, you put it in there, it slides in pretty nicely. It's got a nice rubberized finish on the inside, so it's not going to slip out or go anywhere. You put that next to your computer if you use an external display. And it's sort of a stand, it's just a stand. Speaking of just a stand, this is the Jazz Pro, which does not stand for just a stand pro. But what this guy does is it allows you to put your Mac next to an external display. Probably not that practical from a sitting there using the computer perspective, and I just hit the power button, I'm very sorry about that. But if you're going to put it next to a display and use actually an external keyboard and mouse, then something like that could work very well for you. Moving right along over here, we have the Ren. So this guy is an iPad, iPad Mini holder. And I actually didn't get briefed on how it works, but what it does is it locks into several different positions, depending on whether you want to be in portrait mode with a full-size iPad, landscape mode with a full-size iPad, or in portrait mode with an iPad Mini. It rotates like this, so it allows you to kind of take your tablet and prop it up like this, take your tablet, prop it up like this. It also comes with a couple of accessories. So this guy allows you to hang it off of sort of a horizontal surface. This is a very thick table, so that's not going to work for me. But if you're going to hang it off a bookshelf or something like that, then you just slot this into the back here. There you go. Hang it off something, sort of rotate it wherever you want it to go. And then it also comes with another optional one right here, which allows you to clip it to a vertical surface. So then you could sort of rotate it out and around this way and sort of... I figured my pitch to them was you should sell them as a 10-pack, so that the customers can actually put them all over their house and then just carry the tablet around with them and have it kind of, you know, like hanging up here above the shower and sort of in the kitchen and wherever else it happens to be. This right here is not actually available yet. This is the Cooler Master MacBook Air. They are going directly up against Apple with this... No, I'm just kidding. It's actually the stand underneath of it. So this is an evolutionary step forward from the Jazz Pro, where not only can you adjust the height, but you can actually also adjust the angle. So, you know, you're a DJ, you're someone who wants to use their computer and have it sit on a nice solid aluminum stand with a rubberized base and rubberized grips. It has a very, very nice feel to it. I mean, look how thick the aluminum is here. Most of this stuff is available on the Apple Store, so it's all Apple approved, Apple authorized accessories. So if you're into Apple, then you might care about that sort of thing. Last but not least, we have the Duo. So this guy right here slides together like this, so you can use it as an iPad mini stand or presumably a full-size iPad stand, although I haven't tested that personally. On the bottom, you see a couple of different things. So you have a pass-through for headphones, you have a pass-through for... I don't know what the difference between battery and batteries here. I guess they allow you to run two cables into it. Either way, when you pop it out here, you can see you can...there we go. You can actually plug, because the iPhone 5 has the headphone jack on the bottom, you can plug your audio cable in there, and you can just kind of have it sitting in the dock. Next to this one, you can kind of hide it a little bit inside this one, you can put it completely inside this one, and it's got like a nice rubberized feel to it, and this is a solid piece of aluminum all down here. So that pretty much wraps up the Apple accessories. Don't miss any of our CES 2013 coverage, and don't forget to subscribe to Linus Tech Tips. There are bucketloads of new desktop products at the Cooler Master Suite. We're going to start with the Centurion 6. This brings back sort of the metal accent and that feel of sort of metal quality that I think has been missing a little bit from the $69.99 price point, because that's where they're going to be positioned. This strip down here on both the silver accented version and the black accented version is aluminum, and check this out, guys, these are not plastic meshes. We are done with plastic meshes on $70 cases. These are actually metal meshes. I hope you can see this in the video, but in person, it gives it a better look, and it gives it a better overall feel to the chassis. Other than that, it's something we're pretty used to seeing on the inside, so it has support for dual 120mm reds in the top, and it has a removable cage here, so you can put in as long a graphics card as you could possibly want to have. This guy right here is a little bit unique. This is the Elite 241. It's a very, very small chassis, and the idea is it fits an ATX motherboard, and it's at a very, very low cost, and it's small and narrow, so there you go. Next up here, this is kind of a concept chassis right now. This actually repositions the water cooling radiator to the side, so check this out. Dual 120mm red on the side. What this allows you to do is save on the height of the case, so if you had, for example, a little all-clove you wanted to chuck your water-cooled system into, this would allow you to save at least a couple inches on the top of the case in order to make that fit. So the radiator is... it's slipping. The radiator is right here, which gives you not as ideal of an airflow situation as if you had it in the top of the case, but it allows this case to come in at a lower price point because it has a top power supply, and it doesn't have to have that extra height. Last but not least, we've got the N200, and this is sort of representative of what will be a bit of a new look for some Cooler Master cases, so it's got... this is a plastic mesh again, but it's just sort of a cleaner look, so the half-line has been... has done really well, and that aesthetic has been great, and it's going to continue, but they're also experimenting with a few different things as well. So the idea behind this guy is that you can have... check this out... a dual 120mm red and up to another 120mm red in the back. You can throw a couple hard drives in there, and there's lots of space, so it's an idea... the idea is it's an MATX chassis that gives you options. So you're not going to be able to put in a ton of hard drives and a long graphics card and a bunch of water cooling, but you can do kind of any two of the three without sacrificing very much at all. This is the Scout II Ghost White, so they've got a couple different colours on display. You can check out the inside. It's just basically showcasing all the really cool stuff that Cooler Master has going on in terms of their technology, so they've got their iceberg cooler in there, you've got your removable cages, you've got your support for liquid cooling. I really love the handles on the top of this case. They're extremely robust, they're extremely strong. This is the case that I actually took in my video where I unboxed it, lifted it up by the handle alone on the top over my head, shook it around, and it didn't have any flex to it whatsoever. Thank you for checking out our coverage of the Cooler Master desktop products at CES 2013. Don't miss any of our CES 2013 videos, and don't forget to subscribe to Linus Tech Tips.