Motherboards, PhysX, and an Identity Crysis
As we have relayed before, day 3 was pretty productive for us. Aside from the peripheral investigations we conducted throughout the day, we also took a good look at some of the more tech-oriented stuff. Yes indeed, after all, we are a hardware site. When you pre-register for CES, you apparently also get signed up for many mailing lists from various companies. For once in our lives we chose not to procrastinate and in fact registered early. Needless to say, our inboxes were quite full. Amongst these emails are press releases for products, invitations to parties and meetings during the CES, and of course Viagra offers. It was this flow of information that allowed us to know which companies would have something new on display at the CES. Thankfully most of the companies that send these press releases are not really hardware related organizations. We suppose we will carry on alphabetically with what we’ve got. First up: AOpen


AOpen is a company known for a lot of different things. If they’re not making motherboards they are making new kinds of enclosures or completely new computer concepts. At the AOpen booth we saw several small PC enclosures designed for media center applications. These cases are stylish, functional, and accommodate mini-ITX motherboards. AOpen also had three Intel based mini ITX motherboards on display, one for each market. The high end board was based on the Intel i945 chipset and had support for Intel’s Viiv technology. A mid-range board was available with a similar configuration sans Viiv support. While the two higher end boards support mobile Core 2 Duo chips, the entry-level board was based on the older i915 chipset and had support for Pentium M and Celeron M chips. Another cool thing we saw over there was a TV form factor media center PC. There is a fully working computer in a package no larger than a normal TV, similar to a new model iMac.

ASUS had a relatively small setup that was packed with tons of great new products and concepts. The first thing we liked a lot was the Republic of Gamer motherboard series. We actually have had the Crosshair RoG motherboard on hand for a while sans review for technical reasons. We are very impressed with the features of the board and early performance figures. Reviews we have read from around the net have the Striker Extreme RoG board doing quite well too. Just down from the motherboards were some new laptop ideas that ASUS is working on. They are bringing to the market one of the first notebooks to use the new Windows Side Show feature. This feature is essentially like the external display on a flip-style cell phone. It acts a mini monitor that displays vital information about the laptop in full desktop color. You can navigate from this screen to do such things as read email and browse music files.