Welcome to our second roundup of the weirdness and wonderfulness that is Computex in Taipei.
Welcome to my second roundup of the weirdness and wonderfulness that is Computex in Taipei. Before I begin I'd like to give a big shout-out to the earthquake that rocked my hotel the other night – how you doin'?
Digital TV
As Olivia Newton John may have once implored, let's get digital, digital.
Okay, it's been a long day, but it looks with analog TV signals cutting out in Australia come January 1st, 2008, the Taiwanese are already poised to flood the market with TV tuners, PCI cards, set-top boxes and USB adapters. Philips' semiconductor and IC division are displaying a four-channel picture-by-picture HDTV tuner, and spruiking for integrators to by the technology. Compro has plenty of tuners coming out soon, including dual analog and digital cards, and VisionPLUS has previewed for us a lipstick-sized USB digital TV tuner. This is just the tip of the iceberg -- the Taiwanese are serious about their digital convergence, and there's plenty more to come.
PCI Express: revisited
There's so much of this stuff it's not funny. All motherboard manufacturers I've visited so far have shown me PCI-Express motherboards and graphics cards – it's going to be a big thing in the coming months, and yet the voices are all saying one thing: there's not much performance to be had. Even ATI and NVIDIA were coy on the performance side, preferring to discuss their latest GPUs instead. Luckily though, I'll be leaving Computex with a PCI-Express board (Intel i915P based), processor and PCI-Express video card tucked under my arm. I can't wait to benchmark it as soon as I land next week.
Product of the show?
Have I stumbled across the best product of the show?
At Thermaltake's stand I was impressed with their range of cooling products, especially their more esoteric stuff. These included a nifty 5 1/4in drive-bay plate with fan-speed readout dials, that comes with a remote-control fan-speed adjuster. An ideal product for the truly lazy tweaker. However, for the more addictive PC user Thermaltake offers the 'Xray' -- a 5 1/4in drive-bay that comes with two very important (for some) additions: a cigarette lighter and a pop-out drink holder.
Pictures
Thermaltake Xray
MSI notebooks: Not as good as ASUS, but more expensive than Acer?
MSI held a press conference to launch their new lines of small form factor PCs and notebooks, and announce their happy alliance with ATI. Oh, and NVIDIA.
In a move that stumped the assembled international media, MSI proudly showed a slide that was used to deftly describe their Mega book notebook positioning in the market, but left it with no qualifiers other than what was projected -- we'll let you decide on this one.
MSI and Co.
-- Darren Ellis
Issue: 107 | December, 2009