CES 2006 Photo-Report

As usual, the Las Vegas convention center, and a handful of the nearby ritzy hotels and restaurants, were overflowing with gear being showcased at this year's International Consumer Electronics Show, or CES.  There are a couple of other major electronics and technology-related trade shows that take place all around the world, like CeBIT and Computex, for example, but now that COMDEX is essentially dead, CES has become "the" show to attend in the United States if you want to catch a glimpse of the hottest electronics and PC gear.

CES is always overloaded with the latest in consumer electronics, and a slew of accessories as well. Basically, if it's electronic or electronics related, and someone has plans to sell it, you'll see it somewhere at CES. The show floors are jammed with everything from car audio equipment to PC hardware, to health care gadgetry and back again.  CES is a monster of a show.  Even if you attend every day of the event, it'd be near impossible to see everything without a team of assistants.  It's that big.

This year, we spent a couple of days out at CES, and had meetings with a slew of companies that we know our loyal readers would want to know about.  We took a ton of pictures and had conversations with representatives from every company.  We came away feeling that 2006 is going to be a big year for we hardware junkies. There is a lot of new stuff coming down the pipeline, some of it we can talk about right now and some of it we can't. However, we can show you everything that was on the show floor. Sit back and take a look...

The topics of our conversations with AMD are still under NDA, so we don't have too much to share with you just yet (but stay tuned!). The company's booth was filled with systems of various form-factors powered by dual-core Athlon processors, Turion powered notebooks, and a wide assortment of devices equipped with AMD-made flash memory.

AMD's big announcements at the show were about new partnerships with STMicroelectrionics and China's Third-Largest PC Maker, Tsinghua Tongfang. The company also unveiled their professional "AMD LIVE!" brand.  AMD LIVE! is basically AMD's brand name for compliant media center / digital entertainment systems and devices. Here's what AMD has to say about the AMD LIVE! brand, "AMD LIVE! experiences should offer users the ability to seamlessly connect, store, distribute, access and enjoy digital media content in multiple rooms throughout their home and even take it with them to enjoy on the go, virtually anytime, anywhere."  For more information regarding all of the announcements AMD made at the show, check out their virtual press room. All of the detailed releases are available there.

Over the years, we've evaluated virtually every product to be released by Asetek.  We've tested everything from the original Vapochill phase-change unit to the relatively new Vapochill Micro CPU coolers. The company's booth was filled with various Vapochill cooled rigs, including a sleek, red Prescott P4 powered system overclocked to a healthy 5.1GHz+. Asetek was also showing off all of their WaterChill liquid-cooling kits and a number of Vapochill Micro coolers, for just about every socket type. We chatted about the company's future plans, and they remain committed to bettering their phase-change coolers, but also have plans to expand their liquid cooling product lines. Asetek showed us a very nice self-contained, liquid CPU cooling kit, and talked to us about some plans for liquid GPU coolers as well, but they asked that we not divulge any specifics.  Details on these new liquid-cooling products should be made available over the coming months.  Expect them to quiet, easier to install and maintain, and to perform very well.