TAIPEI--Taiwan's Computex event has always been a crowd-puller. This year's installment is no exception, with more than 25,000 exhibitors showcasing their products. Touted as Asia's biggest IT show, the component makers gave the masses a glimpse of their latest technologies.
Computex photo gallery 
Hitting the headlines for hardware were:
ATI's CrossFire multi graphics processing unit (GPU) technology targeted at hardcore gamers. Touted as the ultimate gaming platform, ATI claims users can potentially double the graphical performance with two graphics cards. Along with the ATI Radeon Xpress 200 CrossFire chipset, you need to configure a master and slave card. The former must be at least be a Radeon X800, while the latter can be any model in the Radeon X-series.
AMD's dual-core Athlon 64 X2 processors were also unveiled at the fair. Though the company had launched its Opteron chips for servers in April this year, Intel took the initiative for the consumer market by releasing its Pentium Extreme Edition processor much earlier.
Acer's revamped Ferrari series caught the eye of many with its dashing new 3400 model sporting a black casing and red streaks as opposed to the originally red lineup which included the award-winning Ferrari 3200. This Acer joins the growing line of Turion 64-powered notebooks and comes in the company's Folio design.
Asus took up quite a bit of floorspace with its many products. One of its attractions was the Vento 3600, a desktop which boasts one of the best graphical performances, according to the Taiwanese giant. A row of nine laptops was showcased which included new models such as the W2, A3, A4 and A6.
BenQ played its part as well with a number of new product launches. We had a glimpse of the compact S80 3G phone which is its first 3G offering, the PW200, a device which backs up data from different devices onto a CD without the need to go through a PC. Also showcased was the TR7270, the company's largest DLP-based rear projection TV to date.
With close to 3,000 booths packing the halls of the massive trade show, we can surely expect even more exhibitors at next year's Computex, to be held from June 6-10, 2006.
