If there's one reason to hate those guys from VR-Zone, that's the fact some of them are now rollin' around a lot of hot pieces of hardware at Computex Taipei these days, and you can understand what you want from "hardware." As a first example, take the image below... but leaving this aside, there are a lot of other things to see there. After all, hot chicks are the salt and pepper of Computex, but the "main dish"...that's a completely different thing!


The first edition of Computex Taipei, also known as the Taipei International Information Technology Show took place back in 1981, when small and medium sized businesses in Taiwan got together to display their latest products, but since early 1990s, it really took off, becoming the second largest computer expo in the world today, after CeBIT. This year's edition just took off, and it is expected to last until the 7th of June, but leaving girls aside, here's a quick overview of what you should see there...

Asus tries to bring ultimate audio into our houses, apart from doing what they do best - motherboards, videocards, monitors, and all the rest. At Computex, you should go and see the latest Xonar cards, as well as the Asus chicks, of course!


Abit, once known as an exclusivist motherboard producer, now seems to push its brand name slowly into the consumer electronics market, since they have announced a digital photo frame with a built-in printer. I would really like to see that up close and personal, but anyway - if you're one of their older fans, don't despair! There are still enough Abit motherboards around, including high-end models, as we've been used to see so far from this excellent company.


There are a lot of interesting things to see from MSI, apart from the chicks present at the company's booth. A must see is the Atom mini-ITX motherboard which is being shipped as part of the barebone Wind system, as well as the MSI 9600 Hybrid Freezer videocard, with "semi-passive" cooling.


Apart from having its own Atom mini-ITX board ready, Gigabye also arrived at Computex with a interesting silent cooling solution for video cards, which you can see in the image above. Claiming that this passive cooling system "cools better than the standard Nvidia solution" is a very courageous thing to do, and I can only hope the Gigabyte GeForce 9600 GT Dual Core card can live up to these expectations.

As I said, these were only a few highlights. If you're in Taiwan or somewhere near, you should definitely go and check Computex Taipei, you have no excuse to miss it!

Alienware and Voodoo sure put together some of the best custom-made gaming rigs out there, but it looks like these two will have some new competitors. We know there are several smaller companies that specialize in custom-made PCs in the US, like Falcon Northwest, and a few days ago I told you that even Acer has decided to step into this arena. Realizing this market could bring fair incomes, it’s time for Diamond to show us its latest PC rig. Diamond Multimedia, the good ol’ sound and graphics card company.

The cool looking gaming rig is not assembled by Diamond Multimedia. Diamond just provided a proprietary Radeon 3870 X2 graphics card for the system, but they also took care of the promotion. Responsible for the customization is Smooth Creations, a rather new system builder from the US. Smooth Creations is well known for its custom painted chassis and this system is certainly no exception.

Apart from the powerful Diamond Radeon 3870 X2 card, the system integrates a Phenom 9750 CPU, an AMD 700-SB600 based Abit AX78 motherboard, 4GB of Kingston RAM, a 500GB Western Digital hard drive and Coolit Systems Eliminator CPU water cooling system. Diamond and Smooth Creations though that hardcore gamers could go ahead and add a second dual-GPU card, so they included a Cooler Master Real Power Pro 1250 power supply to keep everything under control when power-hungry components are overclocked. The gaming rig is claimed to score an impressive 14,019 points in 3Dmark06.

You can order one of these monsters directly from the Smooth Creations’ website for $2,262.92.

If I could do something to make a full day last at least 48 hours instead of 24, buying a gaming console would be the first thing to do afterwards. Unfortunately, I can't make the planet spin slower, so I will stick to my computer for a while, together with Snake Kenzia, when I have a meeting and I get to early or other similar situations (thank you, Nokia!). Anyway, I find it rather interesting to see that Nintendo Wii is headed to domination, despite the strong opposition it has from Microsoft's Xbox and Sony's PlayStation, and this is exactly what we're going to talk about next...


Despite the evolution of gaming related sales this spring, recent figures from NPD show that, while sales of Microsoft Xbox 360, Sony PlayStation 3/2 as well as handheld Nintendo DS and Sony PlayStation Portable dropped in April, Nintendo Wii sales are very strong, almost as half as they were during the last Holiday season!

Anita Frazier, an analyst from NPD, said "The industry continues to set a blistering sales pace, and now shows a year-to-date increase of 31% over last year’s record-setting revenues. This is the first month in many that we’ve seen a decrease in portable hardware and software sales, but it’s important to remember that this year, the Easter holiday fell in March as compared to April in 2007. April 2007 and March 2008 saw sizable games in portable in part due to the holiday timing."

Regarding those figures I mentioned above, it's enough to say that Nintendo Wii, with almost 715,000 units sold in April, managed to surpass the sales Microsoft Xbox 360, Sony PlayStation 2 and Sony PlayStation 3 got together. Do I have to say more?

Well, Shane Kim, corporate vice president of Microsoft Game Studios, seems to disagree with the above. He said "This is only the third year of our [X360] existence and only the second year of Sony [PS3] and Nintendo’s [Wii] existence. Are we just amusing ourselves by trying to declare a winner and loser while the customers are still out there deciding? […] I think it’s way too early… When somebody’s well on their way to reaching 100 million units [that would be the time]."

For me, the Wii is a winner in 2008. What's your opinion?

Less than a month ago, we were talking about Qimonda and its jump from GDDR3 to GDDR5, and now it seems those memory chips have found their place. Where? Obviously, in ATI's latest graphics cards! Today, it became official - AMD announced the first commercial implementation of GDDR5, but they won't work only with Qimonda, since Samsung and Hynix have also been mentioned.


Rick Bergman, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Graphics Product Group, AMD, said "The days of monolithic mega-chips are gone. Being first to market with GDDR in our next-generation architecture, AMD is able to deliver incredible performance using more cost-effective GPUs. AMD believes that GDDR5 is the optimal way to drive performance gains while being mindful of power consumption. We’re excited about the potential GDDR5 brings to the table for innovative game development and even more exciting game play."

These being said, I hardly wait to see the first ATI cards using GDDR5, because that day is surely not that far. With NVIDIA's upcoming GPUs probably still missing the technology required to use GDDR5, ATI may finally grab the performance crown...or not, because this is something that remains to be seen.

There were two important custom gaming rig makers on the market a few years ago: Alienware and Voodoo. In 2006, each of them was acquired by Dell and HP respectively, and the market seemed to be settled. Now Acer comes along and decides to enter the gaming rig business with its brand new Predator line. For the moment, Acer readied only the G7700 model, but we expect that the company should roll out other models for budget-oriented customers, as well as for hardcore gamers.

Acer wanted to make this line special and added a unique case design which comes in orange and black for enhanced contrast and striking appearance. The front door slides up onto the top of the case and reveals two 5.25in drives together with a card reader unit. The top of the case houses a pop-up module that hides the front connectors.

Inside the Predator G7700 we find a standard Nvidia 780i chipset-powered mobo and customers are able to choose among a wide range of Intel dual and quad core processors with bus speeds of up to 1,333MHz.

Another noticeable option is the possibility to include up to 8GB of DDR2 800 or 1,066MHz memory and up to 4TB of storage fitted to front accessible hot-swapable drive cages (under supported RAID modes). Plus you can choose among Blu-ray drives, TV-tuners and even an X-Fi Platinum sound card.

The graphics side must be strongly represented in such gaming rigs, and Acer provides a pair of 8800GT cards in SLI for the most basic system, while higher-end models come with two or three 9800GTX cards in SLI. Other optional accessories include the Logitech G11 gaming keyboard and the G5 gaming mouse alongside various Acer displays, speakers and a remote control.

The press release mentions no prices, but you can visit the official site and keep an eye on availability and pricing.