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Computex 2005 Early Bird Coverage

Posted by Zonk on from the gets-the-worm dept.

zbojnik83 writes " Today was the official start of this year's Computex, but as always we were able to get a sneak peak at the show before the floor actually opened. With the show a day barely underway, we've already seen the first AMD BTX motherboard, a number of NVIDIA G70 graphics cards, an Intel motherboard that can be switched to an Socket-939 board by just purchasing a single card and the details of ATI's new multi-GPU chipset."

43 comments

  1. Does anyone know? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    I hear that NVidia is going to be showing at this show either the GPU from the PS3 or the chip the PS3 GPU is derived from-- I wasn't clear on which.

    Is this true?

    What kind of information are we likely to get?

    Where should I look to get this information?

    1. Re:Does anyone know? by Wesley+Felter · · Score: 1

      Yeah, they are showing the G70 chip and the GeForce 7800.

    2. Re:Does anyone know? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Thanks.

  2. *sigh* by Leroy_Brown242 · · Score: 1



    I miss the good-ol-days when everything used the same socket. It silly stuff like this a non-issue.

    --
    Pretty Pictures!
    1. Re:*sigh* by Leroy_Brown242 · · Score: 1

      HOW PARENT WAS INTENDED

      "an Intel motherboard that can be switched to an Socket-939 board by just purchasing a single card"

      I miss the good-ol-days when everything used the same socket. It silly stuff like this a non-issue.

      --
      Pretty Pictures!
    2. Re:*sigh* by pyrrhonist · · Score: 1
      HOW PARENT WAS INTENDED ... It silly stuff like this a non-issue.

      It ironic stuff like this a +5 Funny!

      --
      Show me on the doll where his noodly appendage touched you.
    3. Re:*sigh* by Leroy_Brown242 · · Score: 1

      LETS GO RIDE BIKES!!!!

      --
      Pretty Pictures!
  3. Not enough by SubSolar · · Score: 0, Redundant

    I don't think there's enough change in the BTX to stray many people from ATX right now.

    1. Re:Not enough by Jeff+DeMaagd · · Score: 3, Insightful

      I've read all the docs and specification PDFs that were released when BTX was announced. I still contend that the BTX form factor is unnecessary.

      For one, it was designed such to accomodate Intel's excessively power wasteful chips that aren't proving to be worth the power they waste.

      For another, most of the changes to accomodate these wasteful chips could have been done as simple tweaks of ATX, call it ATX 3.0. Without having to contend with nearly so much of a change, ATX 3.0 cases could still have housed ATX 2.0 boards. ATX 2.0 case designs would have only needed a few changes to work. Granted, ATX 3 boards might not work so well in ATX 2 cases because the older cases wouldn't have the necessary mount points to take the stress of the extra heatsink weight.

      PicoBTX is nice but given the acceptance of the small form factor ATX systems, I don't see how picoBTX is different enough to be more accepted.

    2. Re:Not enough by MojoStan · · Score: 1
      PicoBTX is nice but given the acceptance of the small form factor ATX systems, I don't see how picoBTX is different enough to be more accepted.

      I thought the (supposed) advantage of picoBTX was the efficient cooling system that's already part of the spec, which can be easily (and cheaply) implemented by any case maker. The components that need cooling (CPU, chipset, and GPU) are in-line with the BTX airflow and the fan/heatsink/thermal module is part of the CPU.

      Quiet small form factor ATX systems tend to have specially designed (and expensive) cooling systems (like Shuttle's ICE heat pipe) and specially designed cases/PSUs. Most of the other SFF ATX systems that have tried to copy Shuttle's success are too noisy or hot. From what I've seen, none of them are cheap.

      I thought the hard part of designing a SFF PC (quiet cooling) was already taken care of in the picoBTX spec. Note that Shuttle's picoBTX system is their only XPC that doesn't use their ICE heat pipe. If picoBTX gets more accepted, we should see more inexpensive, tiny, quiet picoBTX systems from a number of case manufacturers. But where the heck are they? Even Intel doesn't offer a picoBTX motherboard yet.

      --
      TO START
      PRESS ANY KEY

      Where's the 'ANY' key? I see Esk, Kitarl, and Pig-Up...

    3. Re:Not enough by Targon · · Score: 1

      When ATX first came out, there were a LOT of problems with the cases and motherboards of the time(Baby AT was the most common) for manufacturers. For those who don't remember the old days, we had:

      All connectors were on a seperate back-plate, or you could punch out a cover and mount the serial, parallel, game port, SCSI connectors, and everything else except the keyboard connector. So building a system meant you had to connect every one of these connectors via a small ribbon cable to the motherboard. Today we have the extra USB connectors and firewire connectors, but back then, just about EVERYTHING had to be connected individually.

      The power supply had to be hard-wired to the power button on the case. Since the documentation was poor on many of the power supplies and cases, it wasn't unusual to connect the wrong wire to the wrong connection on the power switch and fry the power supply. In most cases, when you bought a case with power supply, the power button would be pre-connected to the power supply, but not always.

      You couldn't do a shutdown from within the operating system because the power button was independant of the motherboard. This is minor, but it's nice to be able to have the system shut itself down without needing to wait.

      So, what does BTX bring that is so much better than ATX? Better air flow and having expansion cards where the chips are on the other side of the card? That doesn't seem like it would really be worth it if your system isn't overheating. You could also have an improved design in cases for improved air flow without changing from ATX. Cards could also have the chips mounted on the other side of the card. If this violates the ATX standard, but it fits into the motherboards and cases, then what harm has been done? Or let us keep the same motherboards, but adjust where they sit in the case and it still doesn't warrant a change in form factors.

  4. Is it just me or.. by Coolnat2004 · · Score: 0, Troll

    Is that room way too small to be packed with hundreds of geeks?

    1. Re:Is it just me or.. by Leroy_Brown242 · · Score: 4, Funny

      Just think of the smell!

      --
      Pretty Pictures!
    2. Re:Is it just me or.. by 77Punker · · Score: 1

      Since they are geeks, they probably have the latest in personal air filtration technology; this would allow them to inhale the air yet remain unharmed by the stench of sweat and the solvent escaping from freshly opened computer parts.

    3. Re:Is it just me or.. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Are you a theoretical geek?

    4. Re:Is it just me or.. by isny · · Score: 1

      Since they are geeks, they probably have the latest in personal air filtration technology; this would allow them to inhale the air yet remain unharmed by the stench of sweat and the solvent escaping from freshly opened computer parts.
      They do have the latest personal air filtration technology, but they pulled the batteries from them to power up a more important technology that needed the power. (laptop, PDA, cell phone).

  5. Computex? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Is that in any way related to BiMonSciFiCon?

  6. Where is it? by YankeeInExile · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    Maybe you, like I, are wondering, Where is it?. One would find Computex 2005 in Taipei.

    --
    How does the Slashdot Effect happen given that no slashdotters ever RTFA?
    1. Re:Where is it? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      What dumbfuck modded this as "offtopic"? I have never heard of Computex and knowing that it is in Taipei makes me fully aware that it's an event I could probably never visit in person.

  7. More information... by BobtheGreatZeta · · Score: 5, Informative

    For those of you interested in the cheap RamDisk tech that Gigabyte is showing off at the show, the SPCR forums have a slight bit more information... http://forums.silentpcreview.com/viewtopic.php?t=2 2448 Here's a quick summary: SATA Type: Unknown as of yet... Email sent to AnandTech about this topic... Maximum transfer rate of DDR200: 1600MB/sec Maximum transfer rate of PCI Bus (not used in this incarnation of the technology): 132MB/sec In addition, DDR266 and others should slow down to function at DDR200 speed without a problem.

    1. Re:More information... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I think the more important question is, will it only work on Gigabyte motherboards, and if so, what are the technical reasons for that?

    2. Re:More information... by BobtheGreatZeta · · Score: 1

      From the information at hand, the card appears to only draw power from the PCI bus and could therefore (theoretically) be used with any motherboard...

    3. Re:More information... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Now why couldn't they instead run the thing on PCIe x1, and have the disk interface go through there. They could still have the SATA port, but instead connect it to a drive for a number of purposes. First, they could use the entire card as a gigantic drive buffer, where the data is written much slower but cached in the card. Second, they could have a miniature drive attached (microdrive perhaps?) and constantly backup the data on to that. The battery could be there in case of failure, it just dumps off the data and shuts down.

    4. Re:More information... by KillShill · · Score: 1

      apparently, it's only 2x faster than a real hard drive...

      i guess when i wasn't looking hd manufacturers boosted hd performance 100x...

      or that because this product transfers thru the aging pci, it is limited to 133 (max theoritcal rate) MB/s.

      these should have been out ages ago and been only held back by the price of ram at the time. i see no reason why this isn't just a godawful cheap hack.

      it deserves no applaud. it only took about 10 years for someone to come out with a cheap gadget that could do this for the masses.

      --
      Science : Proprietary , Knowledge : Open Source
    5. Re:More information... by Vo0k · · Score: 1

      No, it's probably mostly because of overblown HDD transfer benchmarks.
      They love to show MAXIMUM hdd transfers, which are close to ramdisk speeds, because of cache reads, high speed of disk spinning and data density in a sector. Therefore a single, continuous big file read is really fast. But the seek times still suck - physically moving the head takes a lot of time and only the data from cache can be transferred in the meantime. Read speed of multiple small files scattered over the drive will take much longer than any hard drive manufacturer is willing to admit. Even 20 megabytes per second is A LOT. But you hardly ever experience it, because usually multitasking programs access multiple areas of the disk and fight for access time, what causes a lot of seeks and as result, the slow HDD transfer you usually see. The greatest advantage of a RAMdisk is removing the seek times completely, so the 133MB/s is the SUSTAINED transfer speed, no matter how you read the drive and what you access.

      --
      Anagram("United States of America") == "Dine out, taste a Mac, fries"
    6. Re:More information... by Vo0k · · Score: 1

      Neat idea. RAID maybe?
      Too bad, that now, once it's in public domain, it can't be patented so they probably won't pick it :)

      --
      Anagram("United States of America") == "Dine out, taste a Mac, fries"
  8. Bad link to "ATI's new multi-GPU chipset" by Anonymous+Pundit · · Score: 4, Informative

    Um, the "ATI's new multi-GPU chipset" link actually points to a slashdot article entitled "AMD Athlon 64 Dual Core Chips Released".

    1. Re:Bad link to "ATI's new multi-GPU chipset" by Toad+McFrog+Esq. · · Score: 1

      I can't wait to see how ATI's new dual card solution (which they call MVP) stacks up against Nvidia's. Because the link to more info is jacked up, here is a link to a Gizmodo entry with links to more information.

    2. Re:Bad link to "ATI's new multi-GPU chipset" by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      How can ATI allow you to link any two cards together? They mention using a tile based system, well what if one of those cards can't render the effects required in a given tile?

      I can understand if they let you link any two cards in a given family, like an X600 with an X800, but combining a directx9 card with a directx10 card could be disastrous as you'd have to fall back on the lowest common denominator, directx9

    3. Re:Bad link to "ATI's new multi-GPU chipset" by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Unless of course the management chipset redirects jobs according to abilities, so the DX9 card doesn't get any work only DX10 one can do.

  9. The sad thing is.. by bobcrotch · · Score: 0

    People don't even seem to get excited for hardware anymore =(

    1. Re:The sad thing is.. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      i dont know.. .I still get a boner everythime when I see a 21 inch lcd display.

    2. Re:The sad thing is.. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Depends what it displays.

    3. Re:The sad thing is.. by bemenaker · · Score: 1

      Well, things have gotten fast enough now, that changes are smaller and smaller. Not a big reason too. I follow everything, but I haven't seen a product that made me say, "WOW OMFG I HAVE TO BUY THAT YESTERDAY!!!" in a few years. Well, not in the computer field at least. :D Need some new thinking in the design teams.

  10. lack of interest by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    wow, only about 30 comments for this article while other articles from today have 300.

    1. Re:lack of interest by biancmb · · Score: 1

      it must becasue it says "sneak PEAK" instead of "sneak peek"...

  11. PARENT IS NOT OFF-TOPIC by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    I, too, am wondering where it is located. How difficult can it be to add ", in some location, " to the article (where some location is the actual location, accurate to the nearest city)?