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Next was a 1RU rackmount system from Axiom. I did a bit of a double-take walking past this.. it's 3 servers in one. At the back of each "strip" are the usual connectors for keyboard, power, video, USB, RJ45 for Ethernet etc.. they're 3 totally separate PC's with their own PSU, CDROM etc, and only 1RU high! Talk about packing them in.. they're FCPGA motherboards with 1 SDRAM slot and VIA's Apollo Pro 133A chipset, it seems. So you could in theory whack 1GHz P3's into them, but more likely some cool-running VIA C3's and have the smallest server farm around..
Belkin had a pretty big setup there with their range of connectivity and other gadgets on display.. one that caught my eye was the Nostromo n50 SpeedPad gaming controller:
Altech had the only watercooled PC I saw at the show.. I took this picture then got mobbed by some guys from the forums :) so I stupidly didn't get any details about the PC.. looks pretty decent though, obviously a P4 and check out the cooling on the video card!
Speaking of water, Siemon were demonstrating their cabling and other products, one of which was this waterproof power point/plug.. could be very handy in a watercooling disaster. :)
Finally, Intel were running a promotion/competition involving wearing a stick-on tattoo of the P4 logo. AMD had tattoos too.. I guess this person, Scott, just couldn't make up his mind. :)
And that, I'm sorry to report, is pretty much it. Actually, probably the coolest thing for me was the people - plenty of OCAU readers recognised me and stopped me for a chat and it was good to catch up with a few of the vendor contacts I haven't seen since last year - as well as a few new ones. As I said earlier, the general concensus (which I agree with) is that the show was much smaller again this year. A marked lack of freebies and booth babes (apart from that girl in the box) was also a common complaint. Let's hope the organisers conjur up a way to get more vendors interested in it next year and make it bigger and better! If you want to check out my highlights from last year, click here.
 RAID-0 Shootout ATA-100 vs ATA-133 |
 Apple Cooling |
 DIY Parallel-Cable Remote LCD! |