With the highly integrated nature of PCs these days, the Mini-ITX form-factor has become a very viable option for high-performance gaming system. With plenty of motherboards available for both AMD and Intel's latest platforms, equipping an ITX system with a CPU is easy enough. But the small size of the form factor means that housing an ultra-wide flagship-level graphics card remains an issue. For this year's Computex trade show, Antec was showing off their solution to the problem of giant video cards: the Performance 1M case, a Mini-ITX case with a separate chamber just for a large video card.
Antec's Performance 1M is a dual-chamber Mini-ITX chassis that splits off the video card from the rest of the system. The primary chamber houses a Mini-ITX motherboard and an SFX power supply, while the secondary chamber houses a huge graphics card. Notably, the two chambers are bridged using a PCIe riser cable, allowing the motherboard chamber to be far shorter than even a half-height PCIe card, while the video card chamber can hold a triple-slot video card parallel to the motherboard chamber, cutting down on wasted space. For Antec's Computex demo, the company had a triple-slot ASUS GeForce RTX 4090 installed to showcase how this worked.
Antec's decision to allocate most of the case's volume to th video card chamber does come with a slight catch, however: it doesn't leave much space for a CPU cooler in the motherboard chamber. The short motherboard chamber means that system builders will have to use a low-profile cooler; these are readily available, but it does leave less thermal headroom overall for high-end CPUs. So there are still trade-offs for being able to accommodate a high-end video card.
Otherwise, the Performance 1M chassis from Antec look very stylish and are traditionally well built from stainless steel and aluminum. The chassis can be equipped with two 120-mm or two 140-mm coolers for extra airflow (which will help performance), one 2.5-inch SATA SSD, and even some RGB bling. To make the PC built inside a Performance 1M case more convenient to use, there are two USB Type-C ports on the front.
Of course, housing a GeForce RTX 4090 graphics card in a Mini-ITX chassis has its peculiarities when it comes to dimensions and Antec's Performance 1M measures 424×175×260mm, which is pretty large. On the other hand, for an ultra-high-performance gaming system, this is pretty compact.
Antec's Performance 1M Mini-ITX chassis will be available in gunmetal gray and matte black colors sometimes later this year. Pricing is something that the company is thinking about now, though keep in mind that we are talking about unique premium products.
Cases/Cooling/PSUsAs LPCAMM2 adoption begins, the first retail memory modules are finally starting to hit the retail market, courtesy of Micron. The memory manufacturer has begun selling their LPDDR5X-based LPCAMM2 memory modules under their in-house Crucial brand, making them available on the latter's storefront. Timed to coincide with the release of Lenovo's ThinkPad P1 Gen 7 laptop – the first retail laptop designed to use the memory modules – this marks the de facto start of the eagerly-awaited modular LPDDR5X memory era.
Micron's Low Power Compression Attached Memory Module 2 (LPCAMM2) modules are available in capacities of 32 GB and 64 GB. These are dual-channel modules that feature a 128-bit wide interface, and are based around LPDDR5X memory running at data rates up to 7500 MT/s. This gives a single LPCAMM2 a peak bandwidth of 120 GB/s. Micron is not disclosing the latencies of its LPCAMM2 memory modules, but it says that high data transfer rates of LPDDR5X compensate for the extended timings.
Micron says that LPDDR5X memory offers significantly lower power consumption, with active power per 64-bit bus being 43-58% lower than DDR5 at the same speed, and standby power up to 80% lower. Meanwhile, similar to DDR5 modules, LPCAMM2 modules include a power management IC and voltage regulating circuitry, which provides module manufacturers additional opportunities to reduce power consumption of their products.

Source: Micron LPDDR5X LPCAMM2 Technical Brief
It's worth noting, however, that at least for the first generation of LPCAMM2 modules, system vendors will need to pick between modularity and performance. While soldered-down LPDDR5X memory is available at speeds up to 8533 MT/sec – and with 9600 MT/sec on the horizon – the fastest LPCAMM2 modules planned for this year by both Micron and rival Samsung will be running at 7500 MT/sec. So vendors will have to choose between the flexibility of offering modular LPDDR5X, or the higher bandwidth (and space savings) offered by soldering down their memory.
Micron, for its part, is projecting that 9600 MT/sec LPCAMM2 modules will be available by 2026. Though it's all but certain that faster memory will also be avaialble in the same timeframe.
Micron's Crucial LPDDR5X 32 GB module costs $174.99, whereas a 64 GB module costs $329.99.
Memory
While the new CAMM and LPCAMM memory modules for laptops have garnered a great deal of attention in recent months, it's not just the mobile side of the PC memory industry that is looking at changes. The desktop memory market is also coming due for some upgrades to further improve DIMM performance, in the form of a new DIMM variety called the Clocked Unbuffered DIMM (CUDIMM). And while this memory isn't in use quite yet, several memory vendors had their initial CUDIMM products on display at this year's Computex trade show, offering a glimpse into the future of desktop memory.
A variation on traditional Unbuffered DIMMs (UDIMMs), Clocked UDIMMs (and Clocked SODIMMs) have been created as another solution to the ongoing signal integrity challenges presented by DDR5 memory. DDR5 allows for rather speedy transfer rates with removable (and easily installed) DIMMs, but further performance increases are running up against the laws of physics when it comes to the electrical challenges of supporting memory on a stick – particularly with so many capacity/performance combinations like we see today. And while those challenges aren't insurmountable, if DDR5 (and eventually, DDR6) are to keep increasing in speed, some changes appear to be needed to produce more electrically robust DIMMs, which is giving rise to the CUDIMM.
Standardized by JEDEC earlier this year as JESD323, CUDIMMs tweak the traditional unbuffered DIMM by adding a clock driver (CKD) to the DIMM itself, with the tiny IC responsible for regenerating the clock signal driving the actual memory chips. By generating a clean clock locally on the DIMM (rather than directly using the clock from the CPU, as is the case today), CUDIMMs are designed to offer improved stability and reliability at high memory speeds, combating the electrical issues that would otherwise cause reliability issues at faster memory speeds. In other words, adding a clock driver is the key to keeping DDR5 operating reliably at high clockspeeds.
All told, JEDEC is proposing that CUDIMMs be used for DDR5-6400 speeds and higher, with the first version of the specification covering speeds up to DDR5-7200. The new DIMMs will also be drop-in compatible with existing platforms (at least on paper), using the same 288-pin connector as today's standard DDR5 UDIMM and allowing for a relatively smooth transition towards higher DDR5 clockspeeds.
Memory
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