6 May
2001
AMD's
Partners
While the show was AMD's and most of the talk surrounded them,
there was still plenty of time for AMD's partners to extol
the virtues of their products. There was one term that seem
to be hammered into our subconsicious...DDR. Everywhere you
turned, vendors where hawking their new DDR motherboards.
I don't intend to go over every model number presented at
the show, but rather some of the more unique. Oh, and there
were also mention of mice, video cards and monitors as well.
Motherboards
DFI discussed
their new "talking" motherboard. This cool feature
will tell you what is wrong if your system won't post. That's
a feature system builders would love. It should speed up troubleshooting...I
would have liked to see that in action.
MSI
out-dueled DFI by offering four innovative features in their
motherboards. Instead of the talking voice that DFI employs,
MSI uses a series of 4 LED's, D-Bracket,
that show you up to 16 errors if the system won't boot. It
might not be as "cool" as the way DFI talks to you,
but it is still a working solution. Their second feature was
something called "Live BIOS". This technology would
search the internet for BIOS updates and automatically install
them for you. While a novel technology, even with all the
BIOS updates I've done, they still make me nervous. I'm not
sure letting this happen automatically is a good thing. Unfortunately,
the representative didn't go into any details on how this
is implemented. They also talked about their Fuzzy
Logic 3 technology that is designed to optimize your system
for overclockers. If you push your system too far, it will
reset back to the last safe setup. Finally, they offered a
new USB linking scheme for peer-to-peer networking, PC2PC.
This seemed to be a very interesting development. They ship
a special USB cable that lets two computers link together
to form a little network. What is special about this technology
is twofold: it's OS-independent and only one of the machines
needs to have a MSI motherboard. You could theoretically connect
a laptop running Windows 2000 to a desktop running the Mac
OS with this feature.
ASUS
didn't really talk about any new technologies of note. However,
after one of the seminars, we returned to the vendor area
only to see the ASUS display machine locked-up running 3DMark
2001...doh!
NVIDIA
What
I can I say about the GeForce3
that hasn't been said already. Seeing prerendered movies doesn't
do it justice. Seeing it in person running at 1600x1200 with
FSAA is a sight to behold. The chameleon and fortune teller
demos were amazing. When the GeForce3 becomes affordable,
run out and get one.
With
all the recent talk surrounding the GeForce3 and its staggering
57 Million transistors, it's easy to forget that NVIDIA has
an incredible number of solutions for all price and performance
levels. Their current lineup includes the following 13 cards:
Vanta
LT, Vanta, TNT2 M64, TNT2 Pro, GeForce2 MX 200, GeForce2 MX,
GeForce2 MX 400, GeForce2 GTS, GeForce2 Pro, GeForce2 Ultra
and GeForce3. In additional to those cards, NVIDIA also has
workstation level cards, the Quadro2 MXR and the Quadro2 Pro.
The
also mentioned (but didn't go into any details) the Xbox GPU,
the NV2A.
NEC
was displaying one of their LCD monitors running Disney's
Fantasia. Wow, did it look great. The horizontal viewing angle
was particularly impressive.
Input
Devices
There were all varieties mice and keyboards present. Logitech
was pushing their new cordless mouse, the Cordless
MouseMan Optical.
They were also pimpin' their new force feedback mouse, the
iFeel
Mouseman.
From reviews I've seen, this mouse brings new life to gaming.
Microsoft was also showing off their mice and keyboards.
Microsoft
Microsoft
was the last presenter of the evening. To their credit, they
were one of the few vendors that didn't exceed their alloted
time. Their presentation was strictly for system builders
and focused primarily on their OEM business, System Builder
Opportunities and Anti-piracy. It was clear from the talk
they had been bombarded with questions regarding the new Product
Activation scheme. It was also apparent from the audience
that it didn't go over very well (no surprise there). They
also talked about support options and different value-added
services.
It
always seems like the next great thing is just around the
corner, but this show made me realize that we have some great
stuff available now. The Team AMD Tech Tour should be making
the rounds again in the Fall. I can't wait to see what new
toys they'll have for us then.
