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So, where to start? Well, in case you weren’t aware, CeBIT is not just about computers… it covers pretty much anything technology related, so anyone who produces anything you plug in and use was showing their wares. (With the exception of those people who produce the stuff that goes into the back pages of the Anne Summers catalogue, they have a different show all of their own, which DVDoctor has already covered…)
So what was the fastest PC at CeBIT? Extreme Cooling Technologies 5.4Ghz PC is the answer.
Of course, innovation always catches the eye, but imagination is a big attention grabber too. Which is why I found myself drawn to an area behind the WCG arena in halle 27, where to my delight, I found row upon row of perspex cases, and what filled them was really something rather special.
Mobile phones are big business and the market has been waiting for a new reason to push consumers into going out and spending £150 odd quid on a new handset.
The impact of this is to make your media PC a hands free bit of kit, letting you clock it up and down as per your needs. Fancy watching a movie? Clock it down and enjoy the film. Want to game on the big screen? Ramp up the settings, let the µGuru software do the work and enjoy high frame rates in your living room without having to pull out the keyboard at all.
FSP Group is a power supply manufacturer, and as any genuinely competent and experienced PC professional will attest, FSP Group is a PSU manufacturer which has stood the test of time, continuing to develop and deliver products which can be relied upon in even mission critical environments
Primary cooling is water based, with the biggest radiator you’ve ever seen fitted to the front to optimise airflow. Further cooling is provided by two internal 80mm fans hidden behind the facia, but with fan controllers in easy reach from the driver’s, I mean USER’s position. There is talk of a phase-change project to be fitted for the milder weather, but at this time secondary cooling is achieved with the use of the innovative ‘open your window’ system, codenamed ‘Wind-down’.
The K1 is easily adjustable to your needs using a simple tool to remove any key you like and replace it with one of the eight fluorescent topped keys supplied, very handy in a darkened LAN hall and it saves worrying about breaking keys trying to prise them off and then pinging the damn things across the floor.
There’s plenty else to talk about with the Gizmondo, which seems to me to be smaller and lighter than the units I saw running at Gamestars in 2004. With Gizmondo expecting to shift a very significant number of units in the first 12 months and with the feature set it has, this is looking quite an attractive proposition. Game support shouldn’t be an issue either with its’ Windows CE.net 4.2 OS and a 12 game deal with SCI. With a UK release just three days away, I’m eagerly waiting for a sample to play with, and navigate with, and take photos, and watch movies, and text mates…..
ATI have shown the ultimate in exhibitionism and hired themselves an ENTIRE hall. Yep, Halle 27 is ATI world. Decked out in corporate red, ATI show of their goods safe in the knowledge that the only thing to distract you is yet more ATI.
Just a quick one from me. There are a few 6200 AGP boards on show at NVIDIA's partners, here at CeBit in Halle 24. Inno3D have one up for example, but Point of View's is a bit different, since it's not NV44A, rather NV44 and BR2. With its molex feed for power, it's more than just a basic cheap board for the masses, rather for the tweaker on a budget. It's one of PoV's first boards back from production and it's more a qualification sample than one that's currently in mass production, but they decided to take it to CeBit and they hinted it might clock a bit.
MXM has no uptake? Tell that to PixelView, the Taiwanese company showing off no less than five MXM designs using brand new NVIDIA graphics processors.
If you wander over to Prolink's stand at CeBit, you'll not only see NVIDIA's nForce4 for Pentium 4 on their stand, using EPoX's 5NVA+ SLI mainboard, but you'll also see the board running SLI using two 6800 GTs with different BIOS revisions.
I thought, for my own reference as much as anything, I should see what the alternatives currently are for TV tuning on the PC, especially in terms of MCE-certified tuners. I got more than I expected, more than one dual-tuner-on-a-single-card product popping up and some interesting comments from various tuner vendors about MCE and video in general, that I'll save for a future article.
S3's graphics guru, Nadeem Mohammed, is the kind of infectious tech dude that you will to succeed, simply because he's such a smart guy in a struggling outfit that he loves dearly. It wouldn't surprise me if he had a Virge tattoo somewhere.
I had a chat with NVIDIA yesterday in a meeting where they admitted slight frustration at certain pockets of press claiming that nForce4 SLI Edition for Intel Pentium 4 is a paper launch product, while also expressing bewilderment at being asked by the same hacks why it's not called nForce5.
But the M2 goes much farther than simple ergonomics, it has two innovations that make it stand out from the crowd.
You'll have seen the first of the two boards in this picture all over the web recently. It looks like it's only going to be a limited run product for the well-healed only. I've got a strong indication that it's going to limited to 4000 pieces world-wide.
ASUS were also showing off some upcoming Intel i955-based mainboards. 955 is to be paired with Intel's next generation I/O processors, ICH7 and ICH7R. More on that core logic in a couple of days when I grab some 955 board shots from others.<
This is my first time at CeBit and before I flew out, the two things everyone told me were "you need good walking shoes" and "NVIDIA's party is not to be missed". With the first piece of advice paying me dividends on my second day at the show, I wandered along to follow the second piece. I was joined by the rest of Team HEXUS, NVIDIA staff, journalists from other publications and also some guys from ATI, showing up because NVIDIA employees had turned up, hilariously, to ATI's birthday party on Friday.
I've long wondered when Tagan would flesh out their range of PSU to cover top to bottom, something that was promised way back when I first reviewed the now legendary TG480-U01. While they've released the odd new model here and there over the last while, it's only now that they've got a range of units to cover three sales tiers, hitting the high-quality but low-cost, enthusiast, and high-end enthusiast chunks of the market. I had a peek at all three to see what was what.
I popped by Koolance's shared stand in Halle 24 yesterday, where they're exhibiting with Lian Li, and I managed to snag the world's first sample of their brand new ATI X8-series waterblock. Outwardly it doesn't look too exciting, but when you open it up you can see what all the fuss is about.
PC Partner is a company that may not be familiar to a great many of you, but its new Chief Executive Officer seems on a drive to change just that.
Wandering round hall 22 yesterday, I came across G.Skill's stand. G.Skill are a memory vendor who's Samsung TCCD-based modules are very popular among the enthusiast, with their schizophrenic tendencies to run both at DDR400 at low latency and high speed at relaxed latencies and minimal extra voltage.
It sounds like a dream job, doesn’t it? Someone pays your costs to fly around the world, play some games, maybe win a bit of cash and then come home. What a life… Of course, the reality is quite different from the dream, as I found when I met up with Jan-Phillip Bohlmeier, captain of AMD Team64, at the WCG Samsung European Championships.
What's better than two graphics cards in SLI mode? Why, that'd be two watercooled graphics cards in SLI mode. We've got a couple of pictures in from CeBIT of Gainward's CoolFX solution for their SLI setups.
Here at the Sapphire Stand at CeBIT 2005, Team HEXUS has been hard at work dismantling Sapphire’s latest mainboard, codenamed GROUPER. To the horror of Steve Morgan, Sales Director for UK and Northern Europe, Team HEXUS set about with screwdriver and pliers to bring you extensive pictures of the board’s chipset.
Here at CeBIT 2005, you see innovation galore, but at the ECS stand they have something truly special that stands out as being one of the hottest products of the show. HEXUS brings you the ECS PF88, the first mainboard to support both Intel P4 AND AMD Athlon 64 processors.
So although it’s essential to a system (no matter how much it confuses your mum), you can hardly call it sexy unless your idea of fun is to wear beige cardigan to a nightclub and match it with a pair of red patent leather winkle pickers... definitely NOT sexy… until now.
This year AMD have organized a treasure hunt around the entire of the CeBIT site. Now before you go of thinking what all the fuss is about, you need to get an idea of the sheer scale of CeBIT. There’s over 6,500 exhibitors here, some with stands in several halls. And if you’re still thinking that it’s not big, then how about if I tell you that each hall is roughly the size of four football pitches….. and there are 27 of them…and a couple of those are even bigger still. Now do you get the idea?
MXM with other companies? S3 have taken the wild step of putting their GammaChrome (PCI-E solution) on to a MXM module, and it works!
CeBit is a lot of walking. A lot. As a CeBit virgin, walking in my brand new shoes this morning, I passed ASUS's stand and spotted more than a couple of interesting products hanging up on the wall.
Just a short post and a couple of pics of EPoX's nForce4 SLI board. It's got the same feature set as pretty much all the other high-end SLI mainboards, but being EPoX it shouldn't cost the earth. Enjoy.
On the first day of CeBIT we reported on XFX’s TV series titled “Extreme PC Garage”. If your PC is considered sad enough, XFX would fly you and your machine to LA, tear the guts out of it, fill it back up with bleeding egde hardware and then mod the box until it begs for mercy… At the end of all that, you’ll be presented with an uber-stomping rig and all at XFX’s expense.
So what is TNN? In layman’s terms, it’s a fanless system relying on heatpipes and heatsink to keep things cool. What Zalman have done with the TNN 300 is to take the concept and make it more appealing for those looking to move the PC out of the box room and into the lounge
Oh yes, you can rely on us to bring you the good stuff. Over here at CeBIT, the mighty (and rather impressive) XFX stand is showing off the very latest in GFX grunt.. a very sexy SLi set up using two 6800Ultra 512megs!
Tomorrow sees the start of CeBIT in Hannover Germany. Some of the biggest names in the IT industry will be exhibiting at the event, evidenced by the number of CeBIT related press releases which we have seen over the last two or so weeks. From banking systems to digital communcations, there are hundreds of different stalls to see. Lots of new products are being showcased at the event, a new living room PC from Biostar and the new Vapochill Micro to name just two.
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