CES 2006 Photo-Report

Creative Labs was showing off the entire line of SoundBlaster X-Fi products in their booth, along with the company's assortment of "Zen" portable media players, a new Skype based Internet Phone, and a sampling of "Fatal1ty" branded products.

Creative was mentioned on some national news programs after they announced the Skype Internet PhonePLUS, a device that enables Skype phone calls directly through a broadband router without requiring a PC. It was actually the first thing my wife asked me about when I got back from the trip! She heard about it on her drive home from work and thought it could save us a few bucks on long-distance phone bills. A number of other new products were announced as well, including the GigaWorks ProGamer G550W 5.1 Speaker System with wireless satellites, and the Fatal1ty 2020 2400 DPI laser gaming mouse.

Like's Abit's booth from last year, Creative Labs enlisted pro-gamer Jonathan "Fatal1ty" Wendel to showcase the X-Fi Fatal1ty sound card and the new Fatal1ty 2020 gaming mouse in their booth. Attendees were actually given a chance to play a round of Quake 4 against Jonathan.  We watched a few matches while there, and not one person was able to frag Fatal1ty even once. The "best" score we witnessed was 20 to -3. The kid is good.  For more detailed information about the products on display at Creative's booth, be sure to check out their press website.  All of the full press releases are available there.

Dell was showcasing a number of really cool products in their booth. Of course, there was a wide assortment of full systems, notebooks, monitors, and media players on display at varying price points, too many to show here.  We did, however, snap off a hew pictures of the products we thought you'd all like to see as HotHardware reading, die-hard, PC enthusiasts.  The first is Dell's brand-spanking new 30" 3007 WFP wide-screen LCD.  This behemoth features a ton of screen real-estate with a native resolution of 2560x1600, a 12ms gray-to-gray response time, and a 700:1 contrast ratio. Prices start at almost $2200, but expect them to drop quickly if history is any indicator.  Dell also had a swank media center PC on display, complete with a Dell branded wide-screen HD TV.  And they were also showing off some Core Duo and Centrino Duo based notebooks, like the Inspiron E1705 pictured here.  Dell shocked many attendees with the announcement of their upcoming flagship, Quad-SLI based XPS 600 Renegade Gaming PC as well, but we'll save the details on that rig for the NVIDIA section of this article.  Don't sweat it, you're only a couple of pages away!