Day One
It’s raining, and it’s still thirty six degrees. This is the perfect way to sum up Taipei – permanently hot and humid outdoors, while indoors the air conditioner is turned up just enough to confuse your nipples.
 | | Of course within one hour we were greeted with the mandatory hilarious street sign. |
 | | All taxi drivers are insane without question, although fares are excessively cheap - a thirty minute cab ride cost us about AU$5. Scooters zoom into every possible gap, making every trip a life or death situation if not for the passengers, then for everyone else on the road. |
 | | Computex is beyond huge. This is the entry way to Hall 4, just one of four exhibition halls dedicated to the cause. Some of them are multi-level |
 | | Something you’ll never see in Australia, and is quite prevalent in Taipei – a giant technology ad. This one is attached to Taipei 101, a building that dwarfs everything else in the city, and whose logo looks vaguely like ‘Taipei LOL’. |
First stop for the day was NVIDIA, who having launched a lot lately had nothing really new to show, trundling out the Crysis DX10 and Human Head demos that have been online for a while. We saw Microsoft Virtual Earth, Google’s Picasa and iTunes accelerated on GPU – once again not hugely new or exciting, however NVIDIA sees this sort of application integration as a booming new market – something they can focus on other than just games and hence increase its user base.
Of more interest to us was the Cooler Master Cosmos case present, which isn’t on the market yet.
 | | This is the NVIDIA branded model. The proper retail one has a much more tasteful silver/aluminium where all the green is. |
 | | NVIDIA is looking into making its branded Cooler Master Stacker case available in Australia. Your inner fanboy can be at peace at last. |
Next it was off to Intel, who proceeded to get unnaturally excited about 45nm processors in a way that only Tony-Robbins-zombiefied Americans can, hand slaps, cheers, dry humps and all. But to get there, we first had to walk past a booth that our finely tuned senses of irony couldn’t ignore.
 | | AMD’s booth wasn’t particularly huge – at least compared to Intel’s. |
 | | Like NVIDIA, AMD had its own customised cases showing off its goods. These are a one off deal though. |
Walking into the booth uncovered a nice little surprise – something that looked disturbingly similar to HP’s unreleased 20” Pavilion HDX notebook.
 | | It doesn’t quite match the product mockups of the HDX, but we can’t find anything on the HP website that fits this machine. |
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