Many of you may have wondered what has happened to me since CeBIT 99 and I guess it's indeed overdue that I give you a life sign. There was a major change to my personal life after I came back from CeBIT, which occupied pretty much all of my time. On Sunday April 4 I left to Tokyo/Japan, to join Sanyo Denki's Cool Tour, accompanied by the four winners of the previous contest at Tom's Hardware Guide. Sanyo Denki manufactures highly professional fans and CPU coolers and many of you might know them as the maker of the CPU coolers that come with Intel's boxed CPUs. I was impressed to see how quiet and robust Sanyo Denki's fans and CPU coolers are and an upcoming review of CPU coolers at this website will show if Sanyo Denki is indeed providing the best CPU coolers out there. The Cool Tour took us from Tokyo to Sanyo Denki's head quarters in Nagano, where we could inspect the indeed very professional manufacturing line and along the line we were able to experience some real Japanese hospitality and enjoy the excellent Japanese food. An upcoming article about the Cool Tour will give you a more detailed report of the events in Japan. I would like to summarize this Cool Tour as a very pleasant and enjoyable experience.

Visit To Asus In Taipei

After the three days in Japan I traveled over to Taipei/Taiwan, where Asus had invited me to a special technology session. I was greeted by surprisingly beautiful weather, way different to what I knew from several previous Computex fairs in the last years. The leaders of Asus' R&D departments gave me an exciting insight into their development of products for the near as well as far future and I also got the chance to inspect the largest of Asus' four fabs in Taiwan. By now I have seen quite a lot of different SMT-lines for motherboard as well as graphics cards production, so that I feel very confident to say that the Asus fab was by far the best organized, cleanest and most modern fab that I have seen to date. What I can tell you for now is that Asus is putting a major effort to make their TNT2 card the highest sophisticated one on the market, including features like the support of their new own stereo glasses as well as MJPEG and even MPEG2 recording of full blown NTSC as well as PAL resolution without frame loss. In the motherboard area Asus will soon introduce a set of really cool features that will bring major headaches to competitors like Abit and others. Those new features will become official with the release of Asus' P3B BX-motherboard along with their Whitney (Intel 810) chipset boards in the second half of April. The weather in combination with Asus' excellent hospitality and Michael and Annie's (both Tom's Hardware Guide R.O.C.) guiding tours through the most beautiful spots of Taipei changed my picture of this town tremendously, so that I can't wait to get back there again.