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Computex 2005 - Day 3 Tidbits

 by Kristopher Kubicki on June 1, 2005 11:06 PM EST
35 Comments | Add A Comment
35 Comments

Introduction

Day 3 of Computex came and went; the relentless near-100% humidity, minor earthquakes, smoke-filled rooms and continuous wailing of international businessmen intimidates all but the most seasoned show goers. Even though we have been in Taipei for almost a week, new technology is still everywhere and never ceases to amaze us. The crowds are a little smalller than other years, but fortunately for us, it seems that the majority of the attendees are actual vendors, buyers and manufacturers (unlike previous years when a strong majority of local inquisitors composed the bulk of the audience).

Albatron

Albatron had several new items on display, although most of them are not terribly new. Albatron product managers emphasized their new BIOS solutions for both graphics cards and motherboards.

However, the show stealer for Albatron was clearly the “ATOP” AGP to PCI-E converter cards. ATOP allows a user to plug an NVIDIA AGP video card into a PCI-E riser – allowing a user to upgrade to an nForce4 board without getting rid of their old card. While the implications are nice, the practicality of the card is still being tested and there are also issues of clearance that have not been addressed yet. The ATOP bundle pictured below consists of an AGP GeForce 6200 video card piggy-backed onto the ATOP adaptor.


Click to enlarge.

Albatron also had their K8SLI motherboard on display – the narrowest nForce4 SLI motherboard that we have seen outside of an SFF.

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  • Doormat - Thursday, June 2, 2005 - link

    @#17

    RAID 5 is an improvement over RAID-3 because any time you wrote to any one of the data drives, you'd have to write to the pairty drive - you're essentially write-speed bottlenecked by the write speeds of the pairty drive (unless you manage to cache the writes but that still doesnt solve the underlying architectural flaw). You could still read from the array quite fast however.

    RAID-5 gets over this by spreading out the parity so when you write data to one of the array's disks, its more or less going to write the parity out to a random drive in the array instead of one dedicated drive.

  • n7 - Thursday, June 2, 2005 - link

    @ #20


    Nice detective skillz :)
    I hope you are right about that...would be a nice surprise if so.

  • ImJacksAmygdala - Thursday, June 2, 2005 - link

    I think Lian Li needs to take a good hard look at the Antec P180 design and stop wasting R&D time and money on concept crap that will never sell in the market.

    The P180 design could be improved if the drive cages and feet could be reconfigured so that the case could be used up right as a tower or on its side as a HTPC case. Its a shame that Antec did not think of this when it was developing the P180. Whats worse is that the bottom of the P180 doesn't have a brushed aluminum finish and the feet are going to be difficult to move.

  • Chunkee - Thursday, June 2, 2005 - link

    How about some improvment on the photos please.

    jC

  • yacoub - Thursday, June 2, 2005 - link

    In case anyone is curious about the earthquake:

    http://earthquake.usgs.gov/recenteqsww/Quakes/usyu...

  • RyanVM - Thursday, June 2, 2005 - link

    So you said not to expect the X550 until R520 launches. I couldn't help but notice that the placard that the X550 was on said it's launching on June 15. Does that mean what I think that means? ;-)

  • yacoub - Thursday, June 2, 2005 - link

    "4 bay faceplates in the Enermax case, "Hey look! We got pretty lights!""

    That case starred in the upcoming movie remake of The War of the Worlds.

  • ProviaFan - Thursday, June 2, 2005 - link

    JHutch, I remember being told that RAID 5 was an improvement over RAID 3, because having the parity distributed over all disks balances the workload more evenly over every disk. Whether this still applies, I don't know.

  • JHutch - Thursday, June 2, 2005 - link

    Maybe someone can clarify RAID 3 vs RAID 5 for me. It looks like they are both basically striped data with a parity data block. RAID 3 seems to put all the parity on one disk, while RAID 5 spreads it around the array of disks.

    Supposing I have that much right, what are the advantages/disadvantages of one over the other?

  • Jynx980 - Thursday, June 2, 2005 - link

    "The ATOP bundle pictured below consists of an AGP GeForce 6200 video card piggy-backed onto the ATOP adaptor."

    Below -> Above

    Bahaha! Love that sign in the HIS X550 pic "New" written in silver pen! That said, the info on the signs that hold the card are damn good.

    4 bay faceplates in the Enermax case, "Hey look! We got pretty lights!"

    The MGE prototype case looks pretty slick. Makes me think about the shrinking room in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.
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