CeBIT 2008: Day zero
Cebit 2008 - Day Zero
The day zero of any expo has its own unique atmosphere. At that time, expo stands' assembly comes to completion, the demo systems undergo their final tuning, with press releases circulated and distributed, and final training of the staff going on. If we use a single word to describe the atmosphere, we would say it is a chaos!
In some parts, work is going on at full sway,
in other parts the assembly is already over, and company representatives are testing their demo systems. The most popular way is either playing games or watching movies.
Surprisingly, but in some places there is even no sign of an expo stand. Anyway, we won't be surprised if they are erected overnight.
Without any special preferences or plans we ran through half a hall and took pictures of what was unattended. For instance, at the expo stand of CoolerMaster we found a few rather amusing housings
One housing is styled as a Mercedes-McLaren SLR super car with a three-beam star on the front panel (at the same time, it is an air-suction hole)
and something that looks like nozzles of an exhaust system (meant to expel warmed air).
At the stand of abit, we found a lot of top-end boards for the Intel platform based on X48 and P45 chipsets
The company also presented a couple of new ready-made systems:
ASRock pleased us with a demo system with three NVIDIA video cards merged into a 3-Way SLI.
Evidently, this stand will be used for comparisons of SLI versus 3-Way SLI (the latter is referred to as SLI3X, as ASRock put it).
The expo stand of Walton Chaintech was not yet finished,
and the Chinese workers were rushing around it on bicycles:
On our way, we came across the expo stand of Chicony.
The company, popular for its keyboards, is going to demonstrate various digicams and photo cameras, as well as UMPC.
DFI, like abit, is still alive and presented a number of most recent motherboards.
The LanParty series acquired the new board P45-T3R based on the P45 chipset.
The expo stand of Elitegroup was almost ready for opening.
We noticed a X38-based motherboard in the already "forgotten" BTX form factor.
Nearby, we saw regular motherboards, in particular, X48T-A based on X48.
The expo stand of Foxconn was still in the process of assembly, with a huge cryogenic plant taking the central place.
And that is not a decoration but a fully working system:
In a few minutes, a couple of overclockers started putting it into operation:
Having got the chance, we recorded a short video clip foxconn-over-process.avi (~7.8 MB).
Foxconn displayed motherboards aimed at PC enthusiasts. In particular, that is BlackOps based on Intel X48.
Note the water-block on the north bridge. On the water-block, there are mounting holes to fit air cooling.
Also, at Foxconn's stand we noticed a concept system in a huge housing styled as popular transformers.
The housing has a transparent door with a magnifying lens on. Really unusual!
Apart from the "overclocker's joys", Foxconn presented a "green" series of motherboards with power-saving technologies as the main focus. That was visually demonstrated on this system:
We also found a corner where they presented digicams and photo cameras. However, Foxconn is not yet planning their production under own trademark but prefers OEM orders (see the expo stand of Chicony).
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