Comdex Day Four came along, and by that time your THG staff were starting to feel the effects! Normally, most show vets start to think about going home by Day Three, but we couldn't fit in all of our appointments, so we chose to stay over an extra day. Our lack of sleep was starting to show. So, here it is, our final show report for Comdex 2001.

We were able to spend some time with DFI, a company that many folks don't know too much about. We spent time talking to the DFI team about their plans, and, boy, do they have a couple of special surprises in store for you! While they don't plan to announce much prior to Computex, they did release the news that they have signed on with ATI to produce video cards based on the Radeon 7500 and 8500 chipsets. This was quite a surprise to us, as we had not seen any of the final production boards.

Because the glass was in front of the cards, we could not get as clean a picture as we would have liked, but you can see that DFI is building cards based on the ATI Radeon chipset.

As you can see in the above picture, the cards will all have a red-colored board. The 8500 at the far end of this picture was being shown in its pre-production state, but the final board will be red, also. DFI expects that most of the Radeon models should be availiable soon. Some are already shipping. DFI assured us that we will have the DFI 8500 for testing in our labs as soon as its ready. It will be very interesting to see if there is any performance difference between the ATI Radeon 8500 (I guess we should start calling it the ATI reference design) and the DFI 8500.

DFI's Pre-Production Radeon 8500 seen here wasn't the final version of the card. The final version will have a red-colored pcb board, like the rest of the Radeon cards in the DFI Radeon product family. We have to wonder what tweaks DFI has made to the card in order to squeeze a little more performance out of it.

DFI also showed us the AD70E, which they consider their new flagship board. The new board is based on the KT266A chipset from Via, which includes DFI's new Thermal Guardian technology. So, this is the second board we have seen that specifically addresses possible CPU thermal issues. Although we didn't get to see the board running, the specifications look impressive.

The DFI AD70E, based on KT266A, looks like a good bet for DFI. It sure does look like DFI is starting to move toward the performance segment of the motherboard market.