Computex 2005 coverage from Taiwan...

As a foreigner in Taipei, you tend to get away with a lot more than you would when you're back home. Some of the looks you get from the locals in Taiwan are quite priceless, like the chap in the photo above. He's super suspicious of us and probably rightfully so as just this afternoon, the day before Computex 2005 officially kicks off, we made our away down to the World Trade Center area which is the location for the big IT show each year. Our intention was to find some tasty spy shots, hence the "Operation Computex Insider" title.

We left our hotel in relatively nice weather - not too hot and no rain - a rare feat, especially in the current wet season. Our intentions were to visit the general area of the show and take some snaps of the surroundings. We went one better though - we entered the show floor which was surprisingly easy with little to no security on the doors. There's no hardware on the show floor yet, in fact it looks like a war zone mostly right now and that's pretty astonishing considering the show begins in well under 24 hours now. Admittedly, we got some strange looks walking around freely on the show floor - clearly these Taiwanese folk are hard ones to fool. We're not certain whether or not press have a particular journalistic odor but we must have clearly stunk.

At the nVidia booth, they were setup more than most other companies and even had systems up and running. Naturally we snapped away with the digital camera and were soon asked, "Can I help you?" The response: "No, we're just looking". A friendly product manager from ASUS smelt us real quick and quizzed us on which media we represented. We chatted next to an nVidia SLI system and quite quickly nVidia's G70 (GeForce 7800x) came up and he let slip that ASUS will have working samples in their meeting room as of tomorrow (Day 1), which could mean nVidia's next upcoming GPU released quicker than we thought - or that ASUS are showing the product before they are supposed to. Similarly, with GeCube we asked about Crossfire (ATI's equivalent to nVidia SLI) and instantly the friendly lady in charge of the booth setup looked at some boxes on the ground and then studied our press badges and we got the typical response..."wait till tomorrow". The big news at Computex for us is going to be nVidia and ATI graphics and what we learnt in under an hour tells us that most companies already have these products, not for shipping yet but we'd guess ready to hit store shelves by the end of June.

As far as the actual setup of the halls for Computex, there is still a lot of work to be done. Take nVidia for example…

Or Kingmax…

Or GeCube…

And then we walk on and see workers sleeping on the job!

Or people sitting down eating...talk about high pressure to get the job done in time!

Obviously this is a lighter side look at pre-Computex and the stuff our readers wouldn't usually get to see. We'll have full hardware coverage online tomorrow starting off with spicy information from ATI. After a walk around the Computex area it was time to head back to the hotel. We tried hot wiring an old scooter sitting on the street but Asher didn't have much luck…

We'll try hot wiring more scooters tomorrow and we'll see if we can get around to covering some hardware at some stage...;)