So, with that, I moved on to the back of the room. There, I saw two of ABIT's Siluro GF256 GTS cards. ABIT didn't seem to be promoting them much. According to Jeremy Smith of ABIT, nVidia chips were hard to come by and that larger nVidia customers inevitably grabbed most of the chips, leaving little for ABIT. That's certainly sounds like very good business for nVidia and not so good supply situation for ABIT.

Given ABIT's reputation for Soft Menu, I then asked John Tsai why they didn't come up with some sort of Soft Menu for the Siluro. He told me that they didn't think it would be useful but that it was possible and they might do it sometime later. Well, I certainly hope they do actually add some sort of Soft Menu feature to their graphics cards. After all, ABIT is synonymous with Soft Menu.

If you are a loyal ABIT fan thinking of picking up a Siluro GF256 GTS, you will be glad to know that the GPU cooler is attached to the board by means of spring loaded clips. John Tsai informed me that hard-gluing was not a good idea because there is a tendency for the bond to loosen at high temperatures. In fact, the cooler may actually fall off! So, ABIT's sticking with the spring loaded clips for now and for the foreseeable future.

While I don't think I have heard of any heatsink or cooler falling off a hot graphics chip yet, I have always believed that the spring loaded clip is the superior solution compared to hard glue. If used with the appropriate amount of thermal grease, it provides far better thermal dissipation than hard glue. Besides, I have yet to see a manufacturer hard glue a heatsink or cooler properly. The layer of hard glue was always too thick or uneven (lopsided).

And if you are an overclocker, such clips are a dream come true. No longer will you need to use a butter knife to brutally liberate the cooler from its bond to the chip. You can now easily remove the cooler and replace it with a more powerful cooler. All without risk to the truly expensive GeForce2 GTS card.

With its reputation as an innovative manufacturer that listens to its users, ABIT has the potential to become a bigger player in the graphics card market. Unfortunately, they have failed so far to make use of their expertise to develop graphics cards that stand out. Hitherto, their graphics cards have done little but add to the multitude of graphics cards that merely follow the reference design. Hopefully, they will realise their mistake and come up with graphics cards that are above and beyond the rest of the market.

While I was discussing the Siluro with the ABIT reps, they handed me this brochure :-

Hmm... what's that? A dinosaur egg???

Curious, I went to see what it was all about. Lo behold, I was greeted by this innocuous looking computer with a dinosaur egg-like object flanking each side of the keyboard. While you may think, like I did, that this machine was there just to demonstrate the ABIT Siluro GF256 GTS's capability in Q3A, it's actually also used to demonstrate ABIT's brand new product - the Emodulator Home Theater System.