Cooler Master seems to be showing keen interest in small-scale cluster computing, or at least the casing, power and cooling part of it. In a bid to flex its engineering muscle, the company that is known best for its coolers and PC cases, is coming up with an intensive cluster-computer dubbed "20 Cores PC". What might look like an overgrown PC case from the outside, with enough room inside to accommodate an enthusiast PC setup, water-cooling, massive storage, and still room left to hide things, actually is a modified ATCS 840 to perpendicularly stack up to five mini-ITX motherboards, in essence, five systems. Armed with decent skills in networking and virtualization, one can build a small cluster-computer out of those five sub-PCs.

The 20 Cores PC Cooler Master plans to demonstrate this CeBIT has five motherboards powered by an Intel Core 2 Quad Q9400 processor each (hence 20 cores). Each CPU is water-cooled by the cooling system in place. Each motherboard has all essential components connected such as dedicated memory (2 GB per board), and fixed-storage. Each PC additionally has its own optical drive. In the cooling efficiency tests conducted by the company, it was noted that after five hours of full-load, the hottest CPU reached only 66 °C, with an ambient temperature of 30 °C and chipset temperature of 38 °C. The temperatures seem impressive indeed, though credit goes to the three 200 mm ventilator fans, a 120 mm fan, and a water-cooling system consisting of five pumps and a large radiator. The entire unit is powered by a Cooler Master 1,200 W power supply.

Source: VR-Zone

This year ASUS will try to leave the competition far behind, by introducing a brand new motherboard concept, the Marine Cool series. The Marine Cool series design goes far ahead from current Republic of Gamers (R.O.G.) mainboard products. For starters, the new motherboard has a new back plate that utilizes "micro-porous ceramic" technology and spreads across the whole PCB. The heat-pipe system that cools the motherboard's main components is also different, compared to current shipping products. Although the cooling technology remains the same, the whole look of the system reminds of a robot armour. Finally, it looks that ASUS engineers have decided to use SO-DIMM modules to cope with current Core 2 processors (if I'm right that appears to be LGA775 socket). I know it sounds a bit crazy, but pictures don't lie. Have a look and write what you think. The ASUS Marine Cool prototype will first appear during this year's CeBIT 2009 in Hannover, Germany.

Source: AnandTech