Nick Ross gets gadget fever on day two - a laptop with a built in projector, Sapphire's latest, the Asus v Gigabyte fight, extreme cooling, 3D monitors, GPS, and the Eee-killing Acer One.
Today the sun came out.
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| Millions flee as unexpected, big, shiny orb appears over city |
And Gigabyte showed off some of its wares. The new P45 motherboards may not be dripping in the features of its fierce rival, but it performs just as well and there’s less to go wrong and the price is lower. There’s also innovative features like automatic plug and play RAID setup. Gigabyte’s much-vaunted power saving features should also save you a fortune in electricity. Oh and the planet too.
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| The EP45 Extreme features some massive, water-coolable heat pipes for assured overclocking |
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| This P45-based board is more sober but still very fast |
However, there’s quite a furore between the two. Gigabyte pointed out that Asus’ power saving features weren’t up to scratch and may have gone a little too far. This coupled with the Anandtech-gate incident* means there is poison in the air between the two. It looks as though Gigabyte will formally apologise to the much-bigger Asus before things get downright nasty. Asus would probably accept this because the last thing it wants is to find out that Gigabyte is actually correct in its assertions.
*For those who don’t know, Gigabyte invited a load of journos to Taipei a few weeks back. They gave them all discs with NDA information on them and an Anandtech journo caught a cab over to Asus shortly afterwards. Anandtech strongly denies that any secret information was imparted. But, it’s contributed several rotten eggs worth of foulness to the stink.
We look forward to testing whether Gigabyte’s power saving feature really is that much better than Asus’.
But we went back to Asus’ stand and found a few more treats.
First up was a concept laptop with a built-in projector. Our sales guy was very impressed.
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| A laptop with a built in projector |
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| There was also a laptop version with touch-screen screen and touch-screen keyboard |
Then it was over to Sapphire. This AMD/ATi partner has always impressed us with its spin on stock AMD graphics cards but it blew us away this time. Its new FireGL cards were powering a 40+in display with a mahoosive resolution of 3840 x 2160. Pictures, photos, X-rays, CAD plans all looked stunning. It requires two dual-link ports from two graphics cards to generate the image. But if this is a taste of the future we want more. It makes 1080p looks low-res and rubbish.
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| Industry and vertical markets will rave over Sapphire’s super hi res monitor... |
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| ...as well as art buffs and designers |