CES 2006 Photo-Report

ECS didn't have a booth on the show floor at CES, but that didn't stop them from coming to town and showing off some new products of their own.  ECS setup a display in a Tower Suite at the Wynn hotel, full of products designed in-house by their own engineers.

The most notable products were based on the Intel VIIV platform. In the center of their display, connected to a wide-screen HD TV was a VIIV compliant device playing back a DVD (the tiny white box in the middle of the first pic). Just in case you're not familiar with Intel's VIIV brand, it's basically a name given to a product equipped with an Intel dual-core CPU, a 945 or higher family chipset with Intel Accelerated Graphics, Intel Gigabit ethernet connectivity, and HD Audio support.  Inside that little white box on the table was essentially a full-blown PC, running Windows XP MCE, powered by a Core Duo CPU.  The black box that Joe is proudly holding was a similar product, but equipped with a small LCD on its side-panel as well.  The pictures don't do these little boxes justice.  They were very cool to see up close.

ECS had a slew of their motherboards on display in the suite as well, along with some Centrino Duo based notebook designs, and an assortment of portable media players. The white media players above were all flash based, and the black ones were equipped with hard drives. ECS explained that some of the products on display in their suite will be sold under the ECS brand, while others will be re-branded and sold by others.

We haven't seen much from Leadtek here in HotHardware labs in the last few months, so we stopped by their booth to get the skinny on their current product line and to see what was coming down the pipeline. The company's booth was filled with a number of products, most notably an assortment of video capture / TV-Tuner cards, and NVIDIA powered graphics cards. Leadtek's 256MB GeForce 7800 GTX card was on display, complete with its oversized, dual-slot cooler -- the same cooler used on NVIDIA's higher-clocked 512MB GeForce 7800 GTX cards. Right next to the GTX was an interesting mid-range card.  The Leadtek Duo PX6600 GT Extreme is powered by a pair of GeForce 6600 GT GPUs, for single-card SLI operation.  The card can also power four-independent displays simultaneously when not in SLI mode (notice the two connectors at the top of the card), and it features a near-silent cooler. The Duo PX6600 GT Extreme is an interesting product, that could appeal to a small audience who need a single-slot, PS 3.0 capable part, with PureVideo video acceleration, that can power more than two displays simultaneously.