Update: July 5, 2006
Interview with GEIL CEO Jeff Hsieh
Jeff Hsieh, CEO of GEIL, talks about the memory company's history and the importance of catering to overclockers as well as future products such as memory modules with integrated power supplies.
Enermax PSU Crosses The 1,000 W Line
Joerg Theissen, Enermax's Chief of Global Marketing, showed off an upcoming 1000 watt power supply with modular cables. Users can add power cables as they buy extra equipment and the power supply can support up to 24 SATA or PATA drives. The modular cables can also support future cables for powering 64 Gigabytes of RAM.
Patriot's Paul Jones Cheers On The Flash Market
Paul Jones, Patriot Memory's CEO, discusses the latest trends in the memory market and surprisingly cheers on the NAND flash market.
AOpen continues with its MODT strategy (Mobile-on-Desktop)
Gavin Lin, Aopen's Director for Motherboard Development, shows up at our booth with two Mobile on Desktop (MOTD) solutions. The first is their Mac Mini form factor computer and the second is a special motherboard that uses mobile processors. The motherboard also has dynamic over and underclocking to save power.
An Alternative Application For a CPU Cooler...
THG's boothbabe discovers that the Zalman cooler makes a great makeup mirror!
The JetFlash offers encrypted partitions and locks your system when it is unplugged.
Transcend's Barry Cahill shows off their JetFlash enabled USB flash drives. The drives can have multiple encrypted and unencrypted partitions. They can also lock the computer when removed.
The T.sonic 310 is a Flash drive and an MP3 player.
Transcend doesn't only sell regular flash drives. Its Tsonic 310 flash-drive doubles as an MP3 player. Cahill shows off the drive along with its touch-sensitive controls.
Novogo's new portable navigation system takes off.
Alan Shih from Novogo stops by the THG Computex booth to show off his latest portable GPS navigation system. The Novogo is meant to be installed in a car, but can also be carried around. Shih also demos the incredible sticking power of the suction cup mount.
Jevon Yeh, the new Marketing Director of Universal Abit, talks about the reborn company and presents its top model motherboard, the AW9D.
What happened to Abit after the Merge with USI? We interview the new Marketing Director Jevon Yeh and talk about upcoming products.
Kenny Tseng from Biostar talks about graphics cards with 1 GB of video memory and next-generation memory.
Foxconn's GM of the Channel Business, Vincent Yuan, talks about Foxconn's position and expansion plans in the component market and in digital entertainment.
David Wong, MSI's Product Manager for OSD and VGA Products, talks about the technologies that has impacted his life. He also discusses the future of physics.
Supertalent's Fireball flash memory stick takes a swim at Computex
Tom's Hardware Guide tests Super Talent's Fireball flash drive by dunking it in a bowl of water. Can the Fireball survive?
The Computex Rundown
Computex is a massive show to be sure, but if you really look closely, then you will notice that everyone is following a series of trends, customising their own products to fit. This year the digital home, focusing of course around entertainment, was the centrepiece of Computex.
Intel showed off Viiv and AMD showed Live! Showcasing the products of their various partners quite a bit of what we saw on the large Intel floor in Hall 4 was entertainment related, with media centre PCs and the Viiv logo featuring ubiquitously. As we reported, Intel is concerned with noise levels and integrated solutions, such as its Nvidia PureVideo contender, Clear Video Technology.
In the pursuit of this digital home, wireless is becoming an increasingly large element in our day-to-day lives. Streaming and storing content is becoming more and more important, and even the great outdoors is to be conquered in the quest for high definition content on as big a canvas (in this case, the side of your gaff) as possible. Of course questions of HDMI support are raised when you go wireless, and it is yet another confusing strand of information for us to try and bear in mind as we set up HD-Ready home theatres in the next couple of months.
Normal displays certainly remain quite important, and while we didn't see much worthy of burning the house down for (though you may need to do so for the insurance money to cover the cost of some of these bad boys), there was one or two interesting trinkets. A HD LCD monitor, anyone? With HTPCs and HD-gaming becoming more prevalent we may see some life in this segment as the year goes on. What you'd need with a 47" touch screen I'm not quite so sure, but it is nice to know that a major canvas is on offer should you so desire.
On the cooling theme we saw quite a few solutions on offer, from passive cooling to silent fans. The idea of a silent fan might be a bit of a white elephant, though "Quieter than normal" doesn't sound so great on a press release, so we'll forgive the PR hacks that much. One idea being showcased widely is the idea of fans made from rubber parts so as to reduce vibration, and thus noise.
Notebook cooling is also becoming more of an issue, and perhaps the days of propping our notebooks up on books to get the proper airflow into them might be coming to an end. Let's hope so...
ATI is attempting to have its cake and eat it with regards to physics. It wants physics to be executed on the GPU, which is a laudable idea as it saves us having to buy a third card for doing the physics math; and then they come to us after months of trashing Ageia as the third wheel, with a three-GPU solution. This game is enough to make a cynic out of anyone.
Depending on whether or not this three GPU thing actually takes off, bearing in mind that Quad-SLI remains out of reach of most consumers, I take back anything I've said in the past about Ageia sinking. On the basis of having a Crossfire or SLI solution with two GPUs I don't see the need to get a third PPU, except for the extra features which are dependant upon consumer and developer uptake to actually be worth your while, in a chicken-and-the-egg style situation.
However if a three-GPU solution takes off, then the Ageia PhysX solution looks a lot more palatable, especially in the short term. In order to run the three-GPU solution from ATI you have to have a mobo with three PCIe slots. Good luck to you finding one of those in the next three months. However, the Ageia cards run on plain old PCI, and so from a sheer compatibility point of view they make sense to buy. The pricing is higher, but perhaps cheaper than what a three-GPU solution might cost you, depending on what type of card you buy, and you have the powerful Ageia API.
This having been my first time to Computex, I was a little overwhelmed by the sheer scale of the thing (not to mention the locale), yet I was also extremely underwhelmed by the substance - or lack thereof - of the show. In terms of the grand scope of the whole thing we knew about everything "new and exciting" we were to witness, and most (if not all) the minor product announcements could have been done with a press release and a picture.
However, as much as it is becoming popular to write off Computex, I do think that it is a valuable show. I think we can fairly much consign the days of secrets to be discovered and shocking revelations to be made to the history annals of the technology industry. But just because we don't have to go slinking around seedy bars to get the best stories, and to make a "scoop" seem adventurous you have to take your notes on napkins and the back of envelopes for the sheer effect of it, doesn't mean that Computex isn't a worthwhile show to attend.
In this internet age it would be all too easy for us to never meet one another in this industry. Some minor company could tell me about their iPod locks with an email just as well as if I were to stumble into their booth in an attempt to escape the Nvidia booth babes trawling around Hall 2 with their green boxing gloves. But there's a lot to be said for all that face to face contact - it creates stories that, in reality, would never happen if Sinox told me about their locks via a press release, which I automatically dumped into my forsaken inbox folder.
Once again, just because Computex is remaining a valuable show, it does not follow that it is an interesting or entertaining show. Booth babes aside, enmeshing yourself into PR hype for a week and coming out with show coverage of all the interesting bits and bobs we come across just isn't as exciting as it might have one day been. Most hacks didn't even have the heart to study the never ending wall of motherboards on the Intel floor of Hall 4; and frankly how many of you out there could care to the pedantic levels of yore either?
We like Computex as a place to meet our breed and to note down things to review throughout the year. As an essential piece of coverage for the tech world we think that its day is passing.
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