Computex 2005 Begins

Today marks the official start of Computex 2005, the world’s largest IT focused trade show. Yesterday we brought you a sneak preview of the trade halls, and today we’ll be taking a closer look at AMD, VIA, DFI, ECS, and others in our second day of Computex coverage.

We’ll start off by visiting AMD’s booth, whose main attraction was their sponsored F1 racing car. AMD brought in the actual car they sponsor for the show, and in addition to the car showed off their latest Athlon 64 X2 processors.




AMD also showed off a few nForce 4 partner motherboards at their booth, but nothing new in terms of un-released processors and things of that sort.

We then made our way over to VIA’s suite, where we had the chance to take a look at some new motherboard technologies VIA has been working on since January.


VIA was showing off their K8T890 Pro motherboard running two GeForce 6600GT cards in SLI mode. VIA hacked NVIDIA’s drivers and got SLI to work on their K8T890 Pro reference board.

However, VIA’s SLI implementation differs from NVIDIA’s, in that VIA chose a 16x4 PCIe pipeline implementation, while NVIDIA’s SLI design calls for a 8x8 setup.

We’ll be running some tests on VIA’s two 6600GT cards in SLI over the next few days, but the setup is still in it’s beta form and may have a hard time reaching retail due to NVIDIA not officially supporting VIA’s SLI implementation.

VIA was also showing off a PCIe and AGP graphics card setup where both cards can run in the system simultaneously. This will allow up to four monitor support, but only one card can run in 3d at once, so the only real advantages to this implementation would be when trying to output to more than two monitors.