CES 2007 – Day One Show Coverage From Las Vegas

Ultra Products Shows Carbon Fiber Case and 2000W PSU

We previously reported on the Ultra Carbon Fiber computer case and finally got to see one in person here at CES 2007. The case does look impressive, but the Carbon Fiber panels weigh a ton due to their thickness. The aluminum chassis is also thick and heavy, which also adds a bit to the weight. The carbon fiber side panels are set into the frame and have to be screwed down with flush mounted screws. If one was looking for a light weight carbon fiber case and easy to remove side panels this isn’t the case for you.

On the inside of the case we can see how the everything fits. This demo case has a plexiglass motherboard tray, which allows you to see the weave of the carbon fiber. For those of you that have a sharp eye you might notice the long black PCB that is behind the right side of the motherboard tray. This is a new method to reduce the mess of cables in a chassis as you plug in the headers you want to use on the top and then it will run the power down to the graphics cards, cooling fans, and hard drives to where only short cables need to be plugged into the bottom of the PCB ‘power extender’. Pretty interesting design and the carbon fiber looks great. When it came to pricing on just the case we had to sit down. How does ‘under $400’ sound?

Other than the Carbon Fiber case we got a chance to see their X3 2000W power supply that we broke the story on over the weekend. The X3 was found powering a QuadFX system with four NVIDIA GeForce 7900 series video cards with no problems at all. When we asked about how many rails the power supply had we had a chance to cut the label and open one up for all to see.

After ripping apart their power supply for us to look at it looks like it might have just one rail as two sets of yellow +12V wires come out from the PCB and run to various connectors on the daughter board that is used for the modular connectors. This would lead us to believe that it has two rails, but an Ultra employee and power supply guru informed us that they have just one solder point on the bottom of the PCB. Only a handful of samples have arrived in the United States and by the time they hit retail shelves I’m sure the one rail or two rail question will be answered.