Consumer Electronics Showcase (CES) Day 2

Day 2 for us worked out quite a bit better than the first since there was some time to plan out where to go and who to see and much like Day 1 everything started out in the upper floor of the South Hall.

Funny thing here is that on Day 1 while visiting the AMD booth I decided to be nice and help an older fellow who was struggling to know what the long slots where on the partner motherboards (in this case the PCI Express slots) so I mentioned that they were for PCI Express which then started a whole slue of questions from what PCI Express was, to DDR2 memory support, heck I was even asked about the orange plug on the ATX Connector. (External SATA).

I didn't mind answering the questions but I did mind that he and his two friends would not let me get the photos I wanted. When I asked them to step away they all just stood there and looked at me funny as if to say "What you talking bout Willis?" and then went back to their conservations about why the AGP slot went away. Needless to say the AMD booth was first on my list so I could get the photo I really wanted. After that it was down the hall to talk with the Asus folks.

Asus had a lot on display and everything was top notch.

Out of the current motherboard makers Asus is one of the few that designs their own boards instead of using the reference design. They also do a very good job at adding additional features to their products in a way to provide some value add to the customer. They also listen to their users and figure out the best way to implement their suggestions which can be seen in every one of their enthusiast ready motherboards. Things like the LCD poster that translates the 2 digit BIOS code to real text and the easy to use Dashboard Switch(s) allow you to power on, reset and clear the cmos with a simple touch of a button.

The board I was most interested in was this dual Athlon64 workstation motherboard called the L1N64. It features support for 2 LGA1207 FX processors, 4 pci express slots with support for up to 4 GPUs and an upgrade path to 8 processor cores. This was the same board on display at the AMD booth but with documentation and an Asus rep on hand.

On a side note, these lavish heatpipes look pretty sweet but would do you no good if you decided to watercool.