Introduction:

Now we're on to the computer side of the Consumer Electronics Show. As I mentioned, there wasn't quite as many booths this year sporting that many new products that could classify as headliners. The obvious new products include Nvidia's new HD motherboards and 3D technologies, Intel's 45nm next generation processors, newly released Wireless N networking, and solid state drives.

Consumers Electronics Show 2008

Solid State Hard Drives come in two different versions. The older drives weren't great performers providing menial access times and contained memory modules that had a much shorter life span. The newest offer greatly improved read and write performance almost 10 times that of the originals and the memory module life span is much, much longer. You can literally shake the new SSDs fiendishly and they'll continue operating. Try doing that to one of your current IDE Or SATA II drives and see how fast problems arise. The chances are that you'll need to upgrade your components before needing to replace one of the newest SSD drives. If you're curious whether or not the SSD drives you're looking at are second generation, it'll be abundantly clear in the pricing.

Torturing a 32GB SSD Drive While Operating

There's a lot of speculation and anticipation as to how large SSD storage will be before the general users can afford to buy. Some of the latest 128GB SSD drives range in the $3000 area, while the biggest 256GB reach $8000 to $9000! Since first generation is only as fast or slower than current SATA II drives, there's really no reason to think about buying older SSD. There were several booths with demo systems that at least had 64GB and 128GB newer SSD. If nothing else, newest generation SSD are so much more compact needing less space, consume so little power meaning much less chassis heat build up, and perform very nicely compared to current drives. This almost guarantees the future of SSD.

Alrighty, then! Enough day dreaming about technology that should hopefully help computers evolve. Check out the booth and hardware pictures. Feel free to take a break in the middle and come back later.
 

ASUS

ASUS Demo Booth

If you ever have the chance of meeting any of the ASUS personnel in charge of various divisions, you should take the opportunity. It's really easy for consumers and customers to feel detached from big name manufacturers like these guys. But, once you get to meet them, you realize that the industry is one giant dance floor with everyone trying to keep in step but are constantly barraged by endless variables. We may not see it, but they really do try to keep everyone on the same page. The crew was great giving a guided tour of the new and concept products.

Newest P35, X38, and X48

Decisions...Decisions...

As always, there were quite a few new and revised variations of ASUS' laptops. They have them all for the business or recreational users. They also have laptops for the college student who needs one for school as well as multimedia and video games. Well, we at least hope they'll use them for more school than play.

New Gaming Laptop

New Laptop w/ 1TB Capacity

The booth also had some smaller 3D screens for playing some games connected to some pretty sweet game machines. Each machine had the usual 8800 GTX or SLI configuration along with one of the newer game titles running. Some of their best CPU coolers were also installed which of course was intended to show them off which is understandable given that many of them cool really well.

Display 3D Machine

Got Game?

You can see an odd, white control box with a knob next to a laptop plugged in to a monitor. Can you guess what that little box does? It has an integrated graphics card that basically helps turn any laptop in to a game machine. It's an extension of sorts that had an 8800 series graphics card inside that could can be taken anywhere with you. So it's some what portable and can make upgrading your laptop unnecessary. With a turn of the knob, you can adjust the internal graphics card frequency, thus overclocking it if needed. It's of course still going through final testing while marketing decides the next step.

Instant Gaming System

External Graphics Controller

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