Computex 2000 lasted for a week. But time flew by so fast that I felt like I was only there for 2-3 days! Many of you may think 5 days is way too many days spent on visiting a computer fair. If you were there, I'll bet you will change your mind as well.

I wore out my shoes trying to cover any many of the booths as I possibly could. Unfortunately, I had to give many important booths a miss. :( Ahh... well... next time (if there's a next time), I'll be better prepared.

Still, I have to be thankful that I had the opportunity to check out some truly unique innovations at Computex 2000. The following examples in this second installation of the Computex 2000 will give you all a hint as to what innovative ideas the other exhibitors have come up with to lure us all.

AOpen had a rather large booth. That was just as well because it was really crowded there! :)

The AOpen staff there were very helpful and friendly. They took me and Andy (of BXBoards.com) on a tour of the booth. We were shown the latest AOpen motherboards. There were, of course, the KX133 and KT133 based motherboards as well as other AOpen products like casings, graphics cards, sound cards, modems and of course, the Comby 5-in-1 drives (the current fad, I gather).

What are Comby drives? Oh, well, they are a combination of a CD-RW drive and a DVD-ROM drive. That means they can read both DVD and CD and write both CD-R and CD-RW discs. Although you are right to think that such integration would come with a price, performance isn't the price paid.

The AOpen DRW8120 Comby model is truly a speed king. It reads DVD-ROM discs at 8X, CD-ROM discs at 32X and writes CD-R dics at 12X and CD-RW discs at 10X! However, its price may not be as exciting... Heheh...

Still, I believe that such combination drives are truly the way to go. CD writing is no longer out of reach for most people and it makes sense to integrate at least DVD read capability into the present CD-RW drives. Heck, one day, we might even have 5-in-1 drives that reads and writes CDs and DVDs! :)

OpenBIOS 2.0

Although the world was expecting ABIT to come up with a SoftMenu approach for their Siluro cards, it was AOpen who actually implemented a BIOS configuration solution for their graphics cards. They call it OpenBIOS and the latest version is 2.0.

Unfortunately, AOpen did not set up a demo machine for us to test their OpenBIOS solution so I can't tell you how well it worked. Still, I would say that it's a step in the right direction. Too bad ABIT chose not to implement a SoftMenu approach to the configuration of their Siluro cards.

Incidentally, before you run out and buy yourself an AOpen graphics card, note that not all AOpen graphics cards will come with OpenBIOS. Currently, only AOpen's higher-end NVIDIA based cards will have OpenBIOS installed. This means only the following models will come with OpenBIOS :-

• PA256 Deluxe  -  NVIDIA GeForce 2 GTS (32MB DDR SDRAM)
• PA256 DDR 64  -  NVIDIA GeForce 256 (64MB DDR SDRAM)
• PA3030  -  NVIDIA RIVA TNT2 Ultra (32MB SDRAM)
• PA3020 Pro  -  NVIDIA RIVA TNT2 Pro (32MB SDRAM)

This is unlike ABIT's policy of integrating SoftMenu with every motherboard that comes out of their factory. I think this is just AOpen's way of differentiating their plain vanilla models from the value-added models. However, I'm sure AOpen users would prefer them to add OpenBIOS to every model so AOpen, if you are listening, we would all appreciate the integration of OpenBIOS into every AOpen graphics card! :D 

VR Glasses

I also noticed a pair of AOpen VR glasses. It looked remarkably like the ASUS model although it was silver in colour and on closer inspection, was less blocky. However, it looked just as uncomfortable as ASUS' VR glasses. It's more than a little likely that it was made by a third party company that also supplied ASUS their VR glasses. :)

I asked the AOpen rep. about it and he said that it was only bundled with their SiS-based graphics cards. For some reason, none of their NVIDIA-based cards will ship with these VR glasses. I wonder why...

Curious, I checked the specs of the SiS cards and found them remarkably impressive. For example, the top-end graphics card in that line was based on the 256-bit SiS 310 graphics processor which has an impressive 256-bit wide framebuffer and came with 64MB of SDRAM! Still, considering SiS' 'reputation', I doubt the specs tell the whole story.

True enough, while AOpen labeled their NVIDIA solutions as suitable for high-end 3D apps, the SiS-based cards was only rated suitable for high-end 2D video and DVD applications.

Enough of graphics cards. Let's see what new technology AOpen has come up for their latest motherboards!