Tom's Hardware's Computex 2001 team - Patrick, Tom and Omid

Another year has passed and once more, the IT world has made its pilgrimage into the far orient, the land of the motherboards, crazy cab drivers and Happy Kitty. It's my fifth visit to Computex, which is held every year at the beginning of June in Taipei/Taiwan R.O.C. This year's Computex was clouded by big product releases of NVIDIA and AMD, which kept me from starting my Computex reports any earlier than today. This computer show that once was some kind of secret tip for OEMs, system integrators and geeks has now become the most important event of the IT industry, making Comdex look extremely lame and CeBIT seem like a boring Moloch of gigantic size, but very little appeal.

The good thing about the fact that I had to work on huge articles about nForce, AMD760MP and Athlon 1400 is that now, by the time that I can give you my side of the Computex story, the simple and weird stories about this event have already been told, giving me space to focus on the interesting stuff from behind the scenes that is only available to a small minority of show attendees and only to those ones who have been here numerous times before.

Before I will start to cover all the motherboard companies and their new products, I would like to give you some information that I haven't seen anywhere else yet and that might help to shed some light into two of the hottest topics of Computex 2001. Only the subscribers of our new newsletter were given this information already 24 hours ago, so you might want to consider joining the newsletter list as well.