CeBIT 2006 – Photo report

CeBIT is the world’s largest home electronics event where thousands of companies from all over world gather to show off their products and services. We were there to check out the coming products as our OC-guru Crotale displayed his overclocking skills.

Those of you who have been around for while knows CeBIT is one of the biggest events of its kind. Calling CeBIT a computer event is a gross misinterpretation as it covers almost everything that has to do with electronics, media and computers ranging from USB memories to server clusters and complex satellite navigation systems. The event is considered an important opportunity for companies to showcase its products for a broad audience and create connections with other companies, and not the least the media. As a consumer you can’t buy any of the products here, but there are lotteries and competitions with prizes worth over millions as a part of the marketing, and the only thing limiting how much you can end up with is your own endurance.

CeBIT is one of the biggest events in the world and it’s not easy to describe exactly how big it is. Take a regular size hockey arena (~7,000-10,000 people), such as the one where DreamHack (the world largest LAN party) is held and multiply it by 27 and you get something similar. To make a another parallel to DreamHack Statoil is actually there selling Jolt Cola, a cola drink with extra caffeine. In Hannover they take it all one step further and rearrange time tables for the subway, change the open/closing times for restaurants, arrange special parties around the event and more, much more. All this to make sure the huge amount of visitors have a really good time.

With this photo report we will mainly focus on the computer component manufacturers and its new for the same market and we start with first letter of the alphabet and therefore ABIT.

ABIT

ABIT has been busy lately dealing with the USI affair , but it all turned out well and ABIT is now back concentrating on what they do best – motherboards.

First we have ABIT AT8 and AT8 32X which are AMD Socket939 motherboards based on ATI’s RD480 and RD580. The last picture shows ABIT’s Fatal1ty AN9 32X that is one of the first cards presented with NVIDIA’s NF5 chipset and AMD’s AM2 socket.

On the Intel side of things we have ABIT AB8 AB8 that’s based on Intel’s 965X chipset and in the middle we got ABIT AW8D that’s based on the 975X chipset. The AB8 has support for Conroe when it’s launched and for the 975X the developers haven’t received any clear directives from Intel whether it will require a BIOS update or even a new revision of the board. Last off we got a nice little MicroATX motherboard named IL-80MV that is ABIT’s desktop card for Yonah.

AMD

AMD had a big booth with black walls from top to bottom and apparently there were interesting secrets waiting inside. In other words, AMD didn’t have a public showing of their products and unfortunately we didn’t get an opportunity to take a closer look. Beside that, AMD had put a lot of effort into showing its new platform, AM2 together with different motherboard manufacturers. ABIT, ASUS, Gigabyte, MSI and more had working systems running in their booths. Unfortunately it was absolutely forbidden to show any performance stats since AMD haven’t got their processor to perform at best yet. However there is quite some time left until the scheduled release, the 6th of June, when we’ll get to see more performance.

We continue with the letter A in the alphabet and go to Asetek and ASUS.

Asetek

Asetek was there as usual and like earlier years they had brought a set of compressor and water cooled system for the viewers.
The star of the show was of course a system with VapoChill LS and an Intel p4 670 overclocked to 5,46GHz. There was also a VapoChill XE system together with the new extreme water cooling solution that in this case cooled both the video card and the chipset. There was also a system that was  water cooled all the way.

ASUS

Asus had rolled in a real attention grabber in it’s booth in connection with its laptops named after the sports car; Lamborghini.

Asus presented no less than 6 different motherboards for AMD’s socket AM2 and on the pictures above you can see three chipsets from NVIDIA,
ATI and VIA.

It seems like Asus will be able to offer different kinds of cooling solutions for e.g. video cards and processors in the future. On the first picture we have a totally passive 7800GT card and on the other picture is a set of processor heatsinks. Last but not least there was a demo system based on Intel’s mobile Yonah processor.

Next up is Corsair, DFI and ECS.

Corsair

Corsair showed off two different configurations for its new water cooling system. One for processors alone and one for setups with two video cards as well. We talked to Corsairs about water blocks for the video cards, but it hasn’t decided if and if so when these would be released. Corsair also took the opportunity to launch two sets of new memories at 1066 MHz DDR2 and 550MHz DDR. Unfortunately we couldn’t get any pictures of these.

DFI

DFI had a relatively plain booth without any fuss.We weren’t exactly flooded with new products either. First we have a picture of the new DFI RD580 motherboard, which should be ready for launch in the near weeks. And in the middle we have its latest NF4 card, DFI LanParty UT nf4 SLI-DR Venus, a card with only minimal differences from it’s predecessor Expert, that can be seen on the last picture.

ECS

ECS did just like most other manufacturers and showed off its latest motherboard for the coming Socket AM2. ECS also managed to get every color of the rainbow onto the motherboard, which might appeal to some people. ECS also presented some to say the least odd solutions that can be viewed on the two other pictures. These are expansion cards for processors and memory. The card acts like a small motherboard and with the Intel card you also get a northbridge. It’s an interesting idea to say the least and all that remains is to see how these can be used.

Let’s move on to Gigabyte, Intel and MSI.

Gigabyte

Gigabyte was present with its entire current production, and one of the most interesting was it’s own version of Quad SLI. A ”Royal”-version of it’s i975X-model was also presented, equipped with TV-tuner, optical and coaxial sound output. Gigabyte wasn’t just going to stand and watch when all the other manufacturers produce mainboards for Yonah. Of course it wanted to join the game to.

Intel

There was no doubt which component manufacturer which had put most money in their booth on CeBIT. Intel’s booth had light-show competing with that of a advanced discotheque and had like Asus placed a four-wheel vehicle to draw further attention to the display case. Unfortunately, all these pictures were destroyed. However, Intel didn’t show any new spectacular products, and even though numerous attempts to get comments about it’s new CPU architecture no-one seemed to know anything about it. We will just have to wait for the release date in the third quarter.

MSI

NVIDIA released it’s new video card in the beginning of the trade fair was backed-up by several manufacturers and MSI was one of them. Here is 7900GTX, 7900GT and 7800GS which is the only video card with a AGP interface so far.

Let’s move on to NVIDIA and Zalman

NVIDIA

As we already know, NVIDIA introduced a new set of circuits in the ninth of mars (Read our 7900GTX article here) and made some effort to market this and it’s Quad SLI configuration, but also SLI for laptops. In the second picture we see Dell’s XPS computer and the third picture shows another manufacturer which deliver Quad SLI. As we see in the last image you can’t be stingy when it comes to power supply these kind of systems.

Zalman

Zalman introduced a new model of its heatpipe heatsink CNPS9500, with the slightly higher model name CNPS9700. Zalman also introduced a replacement model for their original heatsink CNPS8000. This heatsink resemble much of the latest generation heatpipe heatsinks delivered with AMD’s fastest CPUs. In resemblance with those this heatsink has four heatpipes as well and tight flanges of aluminum. Two pieces of video card heatsinks was also introduced. The first one, VF900, had big heatpipes and a design from the 9000 series.

That’s all we have from the alphabet, but there is one more thing before we close the shop.

As our faithful readers know, overclocking is used in most of our articles, and this article is no exception. Abit invited me to CeBIT to treat its visitors to an overclocking show.

The adventure began “backstage” with an installation of Windows. On the second image we have the motherboard used in the show, an Abit AW8 Max, which has been slightly modified to be able to use the CPU’s full potential. A test run of the compressor cascade showed great CPU potential. With a small increase of the voltage, the Intel 955 Extreme Edition managed to run SuperPi @ 6100MHz, which was promising for the show.

Unfortunately, there was understandably no pictures taken during the show itself, but you can find some at this URL:

http://hardware-test.dk/test_show.asp?id=5169

In the end we reached a stable SuperPi speed of 6216MHz which resulted in a 21.7s 1M calculation.

Conclusion

In the beginning of this article we concluded that CeBIT is big and the reason that this article isn’t bigger depended on a human error that we indicated before. The pictures in this article only from 6 of the 27 halls that is included in this exhibition. We warmly recommend CeBIT to those of you who are obsessed with gadget and it should be a requirement to visit this exhibition at least once. For those of you whom are interested in next year’s exhibition, we have a tip: comfortable shoes. We talked to a journalist that had a step counter and even if he attended a number of meetings, he walked a total of 12 to 15km each day. And in the end, as you usually say: A picture is worth more than a thousand words.