Computex 2008 Wrap-Up

Computex is literally the "E3" of the east. Well, what E3 use to be anyway. However, Computex is an entirely different beast of its own, and host to a ton of interesting hardware and then some. This year at Computex 2008, we saw several major things. The first of these were lots and lots of motherboards. Computex is usually the show where all the major and smaller motherboard players go to show off their product lines.

The usual suspects where there: MSI, Gigabyte, ECS, Asus, Albatron, ASRock, Foxconn, Jetway, and J&W. The biggest show for motherboards and chipsets this time around were Intel G45 and P45 chipset based motherboards from all of the above companies. While P45 is a current hot topic, it lacks a few things that were introduced with Intel’s X48 chipset. For example, P45 only supports up to 1333MHz FSB speeds and not 1600MHz like X48. In terms of add-on board bandwidth performance, P45 only supports half the bandwidth of X48, supporting only up to 16-line PCIe 2.0 interconnects.

In early stages of tests however, P45 seems to be able to hold quite competitively with X48, and costing significantly cheaper. The excitement here is that users will be able to afford top-notch performance without having to pay X48’s premium pricing.

Intel’s G45 chipset really took the majority of the show this year however, as it is the first Intel chipset with integrated graphics that’s able to accelerate .H264 and VC1 in hardware. The chipset also natively supports DisplayPort, which while offering some advantages over traditional DVI, doesn’t currently support ultra-high resolutions above 2560x1600. There aren’t many DisplayPort displays on the market right now either. DVI-based panels still take the cake.