Eagle Tech has a wonderful line-up appearing for the 2013 year, with a new line of headphones, speakers, and keyboards making their way onto the market.

My interest in technology stemmed from video games, so when surrounded by so many emerging electronics, its natural to seek out those that cater to the gamer within. The Consumer Electronic Show has plenty of technologies to whet appetites from countless industries, but the gaming audience has drawn a significant amount of attention. From the hardware you may be packing to LAN parties in the upcoming year to peripherals that will help you reach a new competitive level, I've scoured the show floor with the intent of bringing you a preview of what you may be gaming with, on, or as in 2013.

I was told our meeting at the Mandalay Bay would be something I’d find interest in. Though the suite had many products scattered about, the majority of our time with Swiftech would be spent with an all-in-one water cooling kit. With all of my rigs currently air cooled, it’s a fairly obvious entry point; but this isn’t a new concept. Gabriel Rouchon,  prepared an impressive demonstration of why the H220 stands out from the rest.

Some of you may not know it, because they are a little less known in the US, but Adata is the second largest manufacture of ram in the world. Because of that, when I went to visit their suite I was really curious what they had up their sleeves. As a manufacture of SSD’s Memory, and other flash products I wasn’t sure if they would be showing off new variations of the same old thing, or something new altogether. It ended up being something new altogether.

Amidst the craze of Pepcom Digital Experience, we managed to catch up with Zak Wood from Trendnet, exhibiting the company’s latest offerings. With 2013 the projected approval date for the 802.11ac standard, Trendnet is already taking advantage of the technology to dip into a higher threshold of wireless speed.

Tablets, mini-PC’s, and All-in-One’s have been at many of the suites we visited this week, especially those who produce components to go within. There is no doubt this is a rising market, and it’s overlaps into the desktop realm as well, where small form factor builds are becoming more popular. Our tour began in a neighboring suite of the Venetian with Gigabyte’s offerings in the tablet realm.

Not everyone is so easily excited about new technologies as we are. To assume an attendee of the show is going to give every new external hard drive solution a chance is unfortunately unrealistic. Companies deploy many tactics to attract visitors to their booths, but when walking a convention center featuring more than 1,2000 exhibitors, choosing someone other than an exhausted engineer to show off your product can be the key to catching eyes. A little skin never hurt, either. 

SteelSeries, like many companies, released some teaser images just before CES and they did exactly as planned: got people talking. The Apex, the first non-mechanical keyboard released for a long time, was announced and quickly a lot of questions began to form. SteelSeries saw a busy 2012 with the launch of many new products, especially in the portable market, and we suspect that trend to continue.

We just got back into our temperary office from Cooler Master’s CES party and I just wanted to share a couple photos. They did a small “fashion” show with their models showing off the goods (the goods being Cooler Master’s newest products pervs). While we stay up working on putting together more coverage for you guys/girls, you can click the read more here to see the photos.

Back in 2010, when we got our hands on the Momentus XT from Seagate, solid-state technology was an emerging, but expensive, technology. A hybrid drive that allowed a cache of flash memory and the capacity of mechanical drives allowed consumers to experience the vast improvements of SSD’s at a much lower entry price. Three years have given Seagate time to improve on this technology, and today I get a tour of what’s next with SSHD as they are now known, Seagate in general, and the recently acquired premium LaCie brand.

We had the chance to visit the MSI suites where they were showing off both components and notebooks that will be upcoming in the next year. Although our time there was limited, I did have a little time to get to play with a few of their upcoming products.

Asus seemed to have an entire floor of the Trump tower to themselves, and in reality probably needed it. There were plenty of products on exhibit, and still quite crowded given their floor space. JJ recognized us right away, and dove straight into the demonstration. We had passed monitors, motherboards, routers, and more as he guided us through the suite, arriving at the start line with a Cosmos II and the word ARES glowing from within.

While we were making our booth and suite tours I did sneak up into the EVGA suite for a few minutes to see what they had going on. They didn’t have any big product launches on hand on the video card size of things obviously but they did have a prototype of a new product they are working on.

Our first meeting of CES officially was Cooler Master. We made it over to their Suite at the Palms to see what they would be bringing out over the next year. Not only that we we got to check out all of the case mods they had sitting around along with Cooler Master’s Booth Babes. As usual they had a wide selection of new products to show off, check out what is upcoming inside.

Kingston had done plenty to get us excited before meeting with them today at Caesar’s Palace. The excitement of the HyperX Anniversary StarCraft II tournament was enough to win Adam over, and while the reveal of a USB 3.0 1TB flash drive gave everyone plenty to talk about. Though David Leong attended the Pepcom Digital Experience the night before, you can imagine he had plenty of an audience. Today we met with David and his team for a one-on-one guide through the grapevine.

Enermax and child company Lepa are companies we’ve touched base with briefly in the past, but this year we had the opportunity to meet up with them in a private showing suite for a more detailed look at what they had in the works for 2013. Enermax is a company known for very high-end power supplies, and we had heard that they may be planning to expand their reach into other products as well.

While CES is obviously the main focus, there are a few other smaller, more focused events that go on at the same time to take advantage of such a large gathering of companies and press. An example of one of those is Pepcom’s Digital Experience, they are calling this year’s event a technology tailgate. We didn’t pack up our grill and foam fingers, but we did bring our cameras and enough Red Bull and soda to power us through the event before heading off to Kingston’s Party. With more than 200 companies exhibiting and a few long time friends we wanted to visit, we had more than enough to keep us busy.

Sunday evening we were invited to a dinner buffet hosted by Thermaltake, a great opportunity to meet with Tt and socialize with many of our affiliate sites. Today we’ve been invited to the Palazzo to meet with Thermaltake for a hands-on introduction to what Thermaltake will be bringing to the table in 2013. So far Tt has been fairly quiet about what their plans for the upcoming year, and it’s time for them to reveal their hand.

In September, Kingston announced they would be hosting a free, online StarCraft 2 in honor of the 10th anniversary of the HyperX product line. The tournament ended up with 720 players, including eight professional players who received invites and were seeded directly into the ladder.

We've arrived in Vegas in one piece (more than I can say for my laptop that I checked) (I told you that you had more balls than me -Wes), and have established our office for the next week as we cover the 2013 International Consumer Electronics Show. Preparing to write this article, I've pulled up our calendar for the next seven days, and it's a plethora of events, conferences, and meetings. Of course, our goal is to not only to provide coverage, but also to get those articles to you, the reader, in the most convenient form. If you make frequent visits to our site, it's the best way to keep up with our live publishing. Click to see the rest of this article to get links on how to follow LanOC as a whole and each of the staff that we have out in Vegas this year, as well as what to expect this coming week.