ABIT

ABIT was mainly focused on motherboards this year, and the first one to catch our eye was the AW8. It's based around the i955X chipset, with four DDR2-800 DIMMs supporting up to 8GB. It's also got six SATAII ports, one ATA100 port, two PCI-E x1 slots, two regular PCI slots, a single PCI-E x16 slot, Gigabit Ethernet, and 7.1 AudioMAX HD audio. Notice the heat pipe cooling system on the Northbridge.

ABIT also had 945G and 945P solutions on display - the BL8 and AL8 respectively. Both of these were are similar in feature-set to the AW8.

Next up is the ABIT NI8 SLI, based on the nVidia C19 chipset. It's got four DDR2-667 slots supporting up to 8GB, six SATA II ports, 10 USB 2.0 ports, three IEEE1394 ports, a Gigabit Ethernet port and 7.1 channel AudioMAX onboard sound.

A new chipset on the block is the ULI 1689, supporting AMD S939 CPUs, DDR400 memory and Serial ATA. ABIT's offering is the UL8, but they stressed that this is targeted towards the mainstream market rather than enthusiasts.

For those that can't afford a $US700 graphics card, the newly announced ATI X550 GPU may be right up your alley. It's got a core clock of 400MHz, 128-bit 256MB DDR memory, a 4 pixel shader pipeline, a 2 vertex shader pipeline, and supports all of the graphical enhancements in DirectX 9.0. ABIT's version is called the RX550-256CDT.

ABIT has decided to continue its Fatal1ty brand, with a new motherboard based on the C19 SLI-supporting chipset. This has been dubbed the NI8 SLI and in usual 'Fatal1ty' style comes packed with numerous onboard features.

There's also a new Fatal1ty VGA card, based on the X800XL chipset. It's got 512MB DDR3 memory, and as an added bonus a shot of Fatal1ty's mug for you to admire whilst you're installing it.

ABIT showed us its new version of uGuru Clock, which includes the ability to send and receive calls on Skype directly through the external unit.

Finally, bundled with ABIT's newest motherboards is a universal remote control, which allows you to manipulate your TV, DVD player and PC, all whilst viewing uGuru diagnostics.