Introduction

We headed up to cover the CeBIT Australia IT trade show last week held at Darling Harbor in Sydney - it's basically Australia's version of Computex in Taiwan or Comdex in the USA, just on a smaller and less significant scale.

In previous years, such companies as AMD, Intel, Kingmax and other large computer companies attended displaying their latest products to customers and press. Heck, the swear-happy Atomic magazine wasn't even present either. This year these companies were missing from the show as well as many others, I suspect, even though the show organized just announced an 11% increase in visitors from last year. The only companies who actually flew staff from Taiwan were Cooler Master and Global Win, from what we could see and we did hunt high and low for all the hardware companies we could.

We didn't attend CeBIT expecting to see the unveiling of the latest CPU from Intel or surprise GPU launch from ATI. However, we did attend expecting to see many more hardware companies than we did. The rest of the show space floor was filled up with boring startup software companies showing products which may be of interest to some but not us here at TweakTown. The show could be renamed to an e-government software trade show rather than an IT show. I don't think I will bother attending next year at this rate.

Putting our disappoints from the show aside, we did manage to spend some time talking to Samsung, VR Solutions, Cooler Master, ThermalTake, Global Win, Flexi Glow and Altech Computers who were all present to show off their latest products but boy were the truly interesting PC hardware companies few and far between.

Let's take a look at what was on display at CeBIT Australia 2004.