CES 2006 Photo-Report

Asus was showing off a wide variety of products in their booth, including smart phones, wireless networking devices, large displays, notebooks, and of course motherboards and video cards.

The company was showcasing their Extreme N7800 GT Dual video card alongside the pre-overclocked Extreme AX1800XT/2DHTV (review coming shortly), as well as a handful of passively cooled "silent" video cards, like the X1600 and GeForce 6600 pictured here. The other big story in Asus' booth was their Yonah / Core Duo / Centrino Duo based line of notebooks. Asus had a few Yonah powered notebooks on display of varying sizes, all of which were powered by Intel's brand new dual-core mobile processor. Asus also had a couple of wireless network attached storage devices on display, that could be programmed to download files independent of a PC. Should you want to download a movie trailer or large ISO, for example, you could schedule the download, and it'll grab the file directly and save it right to the NAS device for viewing at a later time.

ATI made a number of announcements at this year's CES, and had a few interesting products on display. ATI made some big news with their OCUR announcement. ATI's OCUR (open cable uni-directional receiver) device will allow future Media Center PCs running the forthcoming Microsoft Windows Vista operating system, to receive High Definition premium digital cable TV content on the PC, without having to use your cable company's tuner. With OCUR, which connects to a PC via USB, all you'll have to do is insert the smart-card normally used in your digital cable box, and OCUR will be able to tune into whatever channels are available in your cable package.  OCUR also has full PVR functionality, but the recording or copying of HD content will be limited by DRM technology.

ATI also unveiled a few notebooks powered by the new Mobility Radeon X1300 and Mobility Radeon X1400 GPUs. Both the Mobility Radeon X1300 and X1400 are low-power GPUs, that bring all of the features of the X1K family of products, like SM 3.0 support and AVIVO, to thin-and-light and performance-thin notebooks.  A number of Radeon Xpress 200 based motherboards were on display as well, like the one from Gigabyte pictured above, along with numerous CE devices equipped with ATI products, like the large-screen HD TVs and set-top boxes pictured here. If you'd like to check out ATI's official announcements regarding the products on display at CES, be sure to stop by their virtual press room. And for information about upcoming products we can't talk about just yet, stop by HotHardware frequently. :)