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Computex 2007 Day 2
Author: Dennis Garcia
Published: Wednesday, June 06, 2007
Albatron
The last company we visited was Albatron. In the past Albartron was not open to speaking with us, try as we may but no response. However we must have caught them on a good day since we got the red carpet treatment this time around.
As some of you know Albatron got their start in the motherboard field and has since expanded into video cards. It is no secret that the motherboard market is plagued with very low margin on return so unless you find a niche to occupy you cannot venture beyond and introduce new features. Albatrons approach to this is the introduction of their ITX and DTX form factor systems. These are "all in one" motherboard solutions similar to the VIA offering with the exception that these can come equipped with AM2 X2 processors, dual channel DDR2 (SODIMM) memory, and 4 SATA drives with RAID support.
They are currently designed to fill the home server space but can also be used for HTPC or any other small form factor application.
As some of you know Albatron got their start in the motherboard field and has since expanded into video cards. It is no secret that the motherboard market is plagued with very low margin on return so unless you find a niche to occupy you cannot venture beyond and introduce new features. Albatrons approach to this is the introduction of their ITX and DTX form factor systems. These are "all in one" motherboard solutions similar to the VIA offering with the exception that these can come equipped with AM2 X2 processors, dual channel DDR2 (SODIMM) memory, and 4 SATA drives with RAID support.
They are currently designed to fill the home server space but can also be used for HTPC or any other small form factor application.
The hot item this year is the "3" series chipset from Intel supporting the 45nm processors. nVidia had support for this on the 680i for quite some time now, there just wasn't any processors around to support it. 
Lastly we come to the video cards. We've seen a few passive solutions for video card cooling and at the moment are a little torn on if they are really worth the hassle. You still need to have some fans in your case for them to work so in a way you exchange one noise for another.
That concludes our day 2 coverage, day three we'll be meeting with more memory companies like Corsair and Muskin and will likely hit up some of the other motherboard makers we missed on day one.
