Of course OCZ had some memory to show, but to be honest, the more interesting stuff was not memory related at all.


One of the most debated products at CeBIT was "teh OCZ mind reading device" called Neural Impulse Actuator. We all have seen medical applications where people's brain waves are measured to produce some boring charts. How about playing Unreal Tournament with it? At the OCZ booth you could see a demo of someone playing UT just with his thoughts and a mouse. The mouse is used to control the viewing direction, the NIA for movement, jumping and shooting.
This is not a fake, you can try it yourself and in just a couple of minutes you will be able to play yourself. The learning phase is much shorter than the first time when you tried using a mouse. You perform actions by controlling your face muscles, one action for example is triggered by biting your teeth together - not strongly, just a little bit to send a neural impulse to the muscles.
Right now the unit is just a prototype, but OCZ is commited to release a product this year, at a $200 - $300 price point which is low enough to attract some gamers. If this takes off and mass production gets running you will be able to see this price drop a lot even further. The unit comes with a software that lets you assign 11 commands to keyboard or mouse inputs, so pretty much any game should work with it. If you think about it the possibilities are endless. You could watch a movie on your TV and control it from your couch - you don't even have to move pick up the remote control. For such applications OCZ is working on a wireless version of the device. Or you could use it in conjunction with mouse and keyboard in World of Warcraft to get that extra quick self-heal off while fighting. Also it helps improve YOUR latency. There's a lag of about 50 ms when the brain says "click" and you actually move the muscle in the finger. With the OCZ Neural Impulse Actuator you could reduce this lag by an amount that could be the difference between frag and fragged.


Another unique OCZ product are those upcoming flash drives. Unlike all other they use a FireWire interface. This allows for much greater transfer rates. These samples are early prototypes, it will be a while until the product is ready for the market. As you can see, one of them has two connectors which makes it extremely versatile because it can be used in both sizes of FireWire ports.


The OCZ HydroJet is a CPU heatsink that is being engineered right now. I really like the sound of "WayCool Technology". Inside the cooler a liquid (not water as I am told) is circulated by a pump. Also inside the unit you have a small fan which sucks air in through the fins at the top. It goes through all the fins to be exhausted on the upper openings facing outward. This makes sure that warm air is going away from the cooler so it's not sucked in again. As heatsink base plate OCZ uses directional graphite (carbon) which has a heat transfer coefficient even better than copper. As far as I know this is the first application of this material in high-performance enthusiast cooling. The fins are so big and packed very dense that the whole cooler has a surface area of 0.6 m².


For a more traditional approach to CPU cooling this behemoth cooler with six heatpipes is coming out soon. It follows the cube-style approach, which is proven to work extremely well. If you look at the fins you see that they are curved upward so that they will not interfere with other board components like capacitors or the installed RAM.