Computex 2007: Intel, Kingston, Foxconn, Gigabyte

Foxconn:

Foxconn has long been involved in making motherboards, graphic cards, and other computer hardware for industry giants like Dell and HP, but just in the last few years, the company has decided to brand its own line of products for sale in retail and etail.

Foxconn was showing off some of their new heatsink fan designs, most of which however seemed pretty basic and mainstream. The company had a full line of their new NVIDIA based graphics cards also on display, ranging from the GeForce 8800GTX all the way down to 8500GT.

And Foxconn was also showing off their line of motherboards that supports Intel’s upcoming 45nm Penryn processor. Pictured is a P35 board, and their X38A model, a DDR3 based Intel X38 board that still has a parallel port for some odd reason.

FIC:

FIC’s CE260 UMPC looked very interesting, as it was the only UMPC I’ve seen thus far that has a full sized keyboard. The FIC CE260 has built in support for both Windows XP and Vista, and includes up to 1GB DDR2 memory, a 30GB or 60GB hard drive, a four in one card reader as well and support for 802.11g, and Bluetooth. It also has microphone and speaker ports, two USB ports and a expansion slot.

It weights only 850 grams and measures 230mm by 161mm by 29.4mm. TheCE260 runs on a VIA C7M ultra low voltage CPU with a clock speed of 1.2GHz. However, FIC’s design is somewhat questionable as a big portion of their screen real estate is taken up by a time / calendar output screen.

But probably most interesting item in their booth is FIC’s new cell phone product, the Neo 1973. The Neo 1973 is based on Linux, meaning that anyone in the world can write software for it. It will be interesting to see what kinds of new ideas programmers would be able to incorporate into cell phones with the Neo 1973, the only drawback is that the phone hasn’t been picked up by any major carriers in the USA so its presence on American shores is question at the moment.

Albatron:

Albatron was also at the show, but this year, was focusing on its small form factor barebone offerings and didn’t make much noise with their motherboard or graphics card products.

The company was showing off a new Windows Home Server product, the S2111W. Based on AMD’s 690G chipset, the server supports socket AM2 processors, up to 2GB of DDR2 memory, and can hold up to four hard drives. A reference P35 motherboard was also on display, but the board looked very plain.

One of the more interesting things on display at Albatron’s booth was their DTX motherboard, the KD690-AM2. DTX is AMD’s own (170x200mm) small form factor motherboard layout, and the KD690-AM2 is the first motherboard to use it. The KD690-AMD2 lists a series of impressive specs, including an integrated Radeon Xpress 1250 graphics core, HDMI, DVI, VGA outputs, Gigabit Ethernet, and it even has four SATA II ports.