New IT products to launch at Computex

The venue is interesting because it's intended for buyers of equipment, so the observant can see the type of machines that will become reality six months or so later, after the HPs of this world choose products and stick their own brand names on the products the ingenious Taiwanese manufacturers have put together.

On the first day of the show, the organisers announce the product of Computex, which is voted on by buyers attending. We've had a chance to look at some of the 16 different systems which are the candidates, and some look very interesting.

The BenQ Joybook 8000, for interest, has a 15.2-inch WXGA wide screen display, Nvidia Geforce 4 Go graphics, a slot in 8X DVD and CD-RW combo, USB 2 and FireWire (four and two), uses a Pentium 4M and has 256MB of DDR memory.

The Asus AP1700-S5 will be a dual Xeon pedestal, 5U server, with six hot swap SCSI hard drives giving a total of 800GB of space, will use two 2.8GHz processors, and support up to 12GB of system memory, a 500W redundant power supply with optional RAID, and dual Gb LAN.

This FIC MB02 series notebook is a Centrino baby supporting Pentium Ms of 1.3GHz, 1.4GHz, 1.5GHz, 1.6GHz, and 1.7GHz, and comes with "enhanced Intel Speedstep". As well as having integrated 1024K level 2 cache, and supporting the Intel 855GM/ICH4-M, it has one DDR SO-DIMM slot for factory/dealer installation, has dealer configurable 2.5-inch high HDD modules, Ultra DMA ATA-100 support for LBA, a fixed DVD/CD-RW combo, and uses a 14.1-inch TFT 1024 x 768 screen. It also supports Bluetooth, IEEE 802.11a/b using the Intel PRO combo, and weighs around 4.9lbs.

The Panel PC from ICP Electronics has a panel mountable 15-inch display, with one 3.5-inch slim FDD, room for one slim CD-ROM, and one 2.5-inch hard drive. It will accept one half size PCI add on card.

The Pundit barebone system from Asus will support Pentium 4 2.8GHz hyperthreading CPUs with 333 memory, has a PCMCIA slot, a four in one card reader, IEEE 1394, TV-out, 5.1 channel audio, and is reasonably quiet at 27.6dbA. µ