Introduction

And I thought Comdex was going to be fun

Comdex was pretty interesting, but also very tiring. Brandon and I had flown in early Monday morning in time for the start of Comdex. I was busy late Sunday night working on the Viper II Savage2000 Review and Brandon was helping with the Gamers.com launch. As a result, two very tired FS hardware guys ended up in Vegas a little after eight in the morning.

We arrived too late to attend 3dfx's 8AM Voodoo4/5 product announcements at Madame Tussaud's Wax Museum, but we did have a schedule chock full of meetings with various hardware companies. Luckily, our second meeting of the day was with 3dfx and Scott Sellers was nice enough to debrief us on the new Voodoo cards, and Kenn wrote all about that in yesterday's Comdex update.

3dfx

After meeting with most of the major video card companies, you start seeing a bit inside the industry and how competitive these companies really are. The 3dfx meeting was very interesting. Instead of having a conference room at the Comdex show, 3dfx choose to hold meetings in a suite at the Venetian.

When we first walked into the suite we were greeted with a table laden with a mountain of cold cuts and various sandwich construction materials. We gave the food a good look, but walked right on - our intent to learn about the new VSA-100 overcame any hunger we had (the fact that we had lunch an hour before might have also helped).

There wasn't much in the way of demonstration displays -VSA-100 isn't even available in silicon yet. There was a large flat panel display on the meeting table playing an endless EA loop, and the only other system around was a simple laptop for the presentation. As we mentioned before, you can read all about the Voodoo 4 and 5 in yesterday's Comdex Update.

Free Stuff

During the course of the meeting, 3dfx's Brian Burke managed to get a glimpse at our schedule for the day, and our next meeting just happened to be with Nvidia. At the end of the meeting, Brian tried his best to get us to stay longer. He offered us drinks from their well-stocked bar, and invited us to make sandwiches and just hang out, "Nvidia isn't going to offer you any of this stuff." As much as we wanted to stay, we had to politely decline. Undaunted, Brain loaded us up with a bunch of 3dfx promotional items. We ended up trekking out of the Venitian with 3dfx backpacks stuffed with 3dfx hats and 3dfx pens.