Computex 2006 - Day 1 live coverage from the floor

Live coverage from Computex floor

Day 1 live coverage from the Computex floor


While our introduction picture above would suggest a fine day in Taipei for the first day of the Computex computer trade show, things have changed since the morning. As things draw to a close for the first day of the show that Taipei stops for (at least part of town, anyway), over head the dry weather has ceased and the rain is coming down with force with the temperature still remaining high, much to the disgust of visitors to Taiwan. Unfortunately looking at the weather forecast for the week, we can expect a very wet and humid weather with thunderstorms until the show finishes on Saturday.

Continuing on to what matters more for our readers rather than being a weather man, we bring you our first day technology coverage from Computex here in Taipei, the capital of Taiwan. Most folks have already arrived in Taipei by now and the show is well and truly underway with a good amount of people occupying the Computex area. The famous "NY NY" building finally has some company now with AMD, as usual, taking the top with a large inflatable sign and Intel and Sony occupying the rest of the space with some others on other parts of the building.

We started the day surprisingly early this morning at around 10am - and I say surprisingly because we held a Webmaster and Press Party last night and we all managed to get pretty drunk in a short time. We start the day talking to the folks from Corsair about their PC10000 capable memory and new cooling products and finish things off checking out a special new Intel "Broadwater" 965P Express motherboard from Gigabyte. We ended up seeing a bunch of different companies all with something interesting to show.

Welcome to Computex - kick back and feast on the very latest hardware which you'll be able to spend your hard earned dollars on soon!


EDITOR WARNING: Some of these images have purposely been left at full quality (no compression) for best effect. Some of the large versions of the images are over 1MB - 56k users, you have been warned.

Corsair shows PC10000 and RAM cooler

Corsair shows off PC10000 and new RAM cooler

Our first stop for Day 1 was at Corsair who showcased their products in a suite at the Grand Hyatt hotel.

As usual, Corsair usually save something special for Computex each year - usually to out do any other memory company at the show. Without fail, they managed to surprise us with an AMD Athlon FX-62 based system with XMS DDR-2 memory modules running at an incredible 1252MHz DDR (or PC10000) on an ASUS nVidia nForce 590 SLI motherboard.

This was achieved by setting the CPU HTT to 313MHz which made the FX-62 processor run a little over 3.1GHz. The timings were 5-5-5-18 with a command rate of 2T. Not too shabby at all, we think!







Next on the list from Corsair is a new memory cooler which is due to come out soon - they are just waiting on some branding name decisions to be made. The cooler comes with a total of three fans which assist in providing a better memory overclocking experience. Apparently the fan plugs into a normal 3-pin motherboard fan connector which means the BIOS should be able to take care of all the thermal controls.



Corsair are also putting the finishing touching on their new SLI water block which works with the already released Corsair Nautilus 500 external water cooling system.



Oh, and thanks for the 1GB Voyager pen drive guys!

HIS mix and match Crossfire plus Dual Mode

HIS mix and match Crossfire plus Dual Mode Graphics Card

Also at the Grand Hyatt were our friends from HIS who are based out of Hong Kong. While ATI don't have anything overly exciting this year to announce at Computex in terms of GPU's, HIS still had a couple interesting products for us to take a look at.

Probably the most interesting product we saw was their Radeon X1600 Pro with Dual Interface. With this unique setup, you can choose to run either AGP 8x or PCI Express depending on what motherboard you use. It would be very interesting to know if HIS could use this technology on a brand new high-end X1900XTX which would be great for users who didn't wish to upgrade their motherboard, memory and CPU but HIS weren't sure and we think ATI would have something to say about that.



Next up is another HIS Radeon X1600 but with a major difference. It's a low-profile version with Dual DVI and HDMI - perfect for a HTPC.



And lastly we have some proof that the mixing and matching of different X1900 series Radeon graphics cards works just fine with Crossfire Dual GPU technology enabled. HIS were showing a regular X1900 Crossfire master card working with one of their new IceQ 3 X1900XTX cards.



You'll still need a cable to connect the cards together but at least this technology is improving and becoming more flexible.

Cases from Cooler Master and Biostar

Computer cases from Cooler Master and Biostar

We quickly stopped by Cooler Master and Biostar rooms at the Grand Hyatt who were showing off some very nice looking computer cases. While Cooler Master were mostly showing new full tower cases, Biostar were showing some very impressive Intel Viiv compatible small form factor systems which would go quite well at home under the plasma screen.





















All impressive offerings from both companies!

Palit overclocks VGA and funky LCD glasses

Palit overclocks their GeForce graphics cards

Palit introduced us to their new range of "Sonic" graphics cards which comes factory-overclocked, at a decent price. For example, the Palit GeForce 7900GT Sonic comes clocked at 550MHz core and 1320MHz DDR memory - the reference clock speed is 470MHz core and the same memory clock speed.

We would have liked to see this card use the same faster memory found on 7900GTX cards but for a company who has traditionally never really stepped outside of the square, this is a good start we think and we look forward to more of this type of thing in the future.







By the way, it is kind of strange to see RED GeForce graphics cards but each to their own.


Funky LCD Glasses from Explorer

Elvis and our friends from an OEM and ODM company here in Taiwan called Explorer have developed a new product which we think is quite funky and we're quite surprised this type of product hasn't been introduced sooner.

Ever thought of it being possible to watch a movie or surf the internet on your PC without any monitor or screen? Well, you can and as Explorer say, this product provides mobility freedom. The LCD glasses from Explorer use a standard composite video or S-VIDEO cable and plug into any source with these types of video output ports. Not only do you get video but also audio and we were surprised by the sound quality, which was quite satisfactory.

So, now you might be wondering exactly how these glasses work? Inside in the glasses (where the actual glass is in normal sun glasses) are two small LCD screens, each with their own adjustments for blurriness since with this concept, everyone sees things differently. Explorer had a comparison between an LCD TV and the LCD glasses showing "The Minority Report" DVD.

The quality is pretty good for a product which is still being tested - it's not quite ready for consumer usage but it is close. Remember to send us a set of the glasses to test once they are finished, Explorer!







Cool!

Foxconn's enthusiast C51XEM2AA AM2 board

Foxconn's enthusiast C51XEM2AA AM2 motherboard

This afternoon Foxconn held a very up-beat press conference near the Computex area to announce their entry into the retail market as a serious contender for enthusiasts (read: proper channel sales business and success).





At their press conference staff high-ups from Foxconn, AMD, Corsair and Dolby Labs talked about the technology behind Foxconn's C51XEM2AA AM2 motherboard which is based on nVidia's nForce 590 SLI chipset.



While many in the industry have doubted Foxconn as being a real competitor in the retail market after many years of tremendous success in the OEM sector, it seems like Foxconn is starting to make a stand and people are starting to stand up and take notice slowly but surely. Foxconn engineers are starting to think the right way when it comes to creating a real enthusiast based motherboard. From the press release:

Unlike some competitor products, the C51XEM2AA delivers features the enthusiast will really appreciate; reset and power buttons on board - so no more screwdrivers and jumpers for restarting the system 'on the bench', an onboard speaker and 2-digit LED display for easy error debugging, and one of the most comprehensive BIOS menus ever devised. The BIOS displays current values, making it easier for the user to fine-tune their system, whilst voltage increments are intelligently displayed based around existing values, enabling tiny increments to be implemented for real fine-tuning. BIOS settings can be stored in 'profiles' enabling quick and easy retrieval of the numerous settings and tweaks, while the C51XEM2AA also ships with nTune™ 5.0 - one of the most comprehensive Windows-based system control tools ever devised.

If anything, the main purpose of the press conference felt like Foxconn was trying to send out a strong message to everyone in the industry that they mean business and they have the backing of their partners (such as nVidia and AMD) to do so - at least that is the impression we got. We look forward to getting the C51XEM2AA AM2 motherboard in for review, it does look quite promising and a step in the right direction for Foxconn but only the future will tell how well they end up doing in the retail market.

Gigabyte's packed high-end Conroe board

Gigabyte's packed high-end Conroe motherboard



The last stop of the day was the Gigabyte booth in Hall 2 where we got a chance to have a close up look at a final shipping version of their new 965P-DQ6 motherboard based on the codenamed Broadwater 965P Express chipset for Intel Core 2 and Core 2 Extreme processors.

DQ6 is a new series of motherboards from Gigabyte offering a LOT of different features all packed onto a single motherboard, most of them coming in groups of four, hence the "QUAD" marketing scheme. Where we do start? For starters, it included 12 phase power which will assist you a great deal when it comes to CPU overclocking. The cooling design called "Silent-Pipe Technology" is complete silent with an attractive copper heat pipe design. You'll get 8 channel audio with HD support including real Dolby and DTS output through the onboard digital coaxial and optical out ports.

Interestingly, Gigabyte claim this motherboard is ready for Quad Core processors from Intel although we haven't heard much about that yet but if Gigabyte know something about it, Intel couldn't be too far off launching - having said that, it probably won't be till late in 2007 when that happens. Presumably a simple BIOS update will provide support for future Quad Core CPU's from Intel. We'll keep our eyes open during the rest of the show at Computex in case we hear something.

Today was also our first chance to have a hands-on play with e.SATA 2 (external SATA) and this motherboard allows you to use a total of four SATA drives (with support for Serial ATA 3GB/s) outside of your case with full hot-plug support.





Back on the subject of cooling, Gigabyte are clearing trying to create the 965P-DQ6 as being one of the best for overclockers and gamers. Included is a feature called "CRAZY COOL" which employs the use of a special copper cooler on the back of the motherboard under the CPU socket area. This aids in keeping more parts of the motherboard cool which will assist in overclocking and the life of the board, especially when you are putting it under more stress when overclocking - Gigabyte have got you covered. And on the subject of durability, Gigabyte also made it quite clear to us several times that this board (and we think others also) are using a new type of all-solid state and more expensive capacitors to aid in the extended life of your motherboard.









I clearly remember just a few years ago when people laughed at the thought of using a Gigabyte motherboard - anyone laughing now? We don't think so. So, clearly Gigabyte's marketing worked has on us but we believe it will be a good product but we'll wait for our final conclusion when we get it into our labs shortly.


MORE TOMORROW FROM DAY 2 AT COMPUTEX...