Albatron
The most interesting product Albatron had on display at Computex was its passively cooled GeForce 7900 GT.

Albatron's GeForce 7900 GT

Complete with passive cooling out back

Passive cooling is all the rage these days, and although it's common at the lower end of the graphics card spectrum, it's relatively rare on high-end cards like the GeForce 7900 GT. We've seen far too many GeForce 7900 GTs stuck with noisy reference coolers, so a silent, passive design is certainly welcome if it gets the job done.

Asus
As with nearly every trade show, Asus had plenty of wares on display—from laptops to motherboards, and nearly everything in between. The company's most interesting new products are easily its line of Digital Home motherboards.

The Digital Home series' Wi-Fi bundle and remote

Asus' Digital Home drive bay insert

These Digital Home boards will come with a number of bundled extras, including a Wi-Fi antenna, a remote control, and a drive bay insert that packs an integrated card reader and numerous expansion ports. In a unique twist, portable audio players plugged into the drive bay can play music back through a PC's speakers even when the system is turned off.

The P5W DH Deluxe

There are a number of motherboards in the Digital Home line, but only for Intel processors. The P5W DH Deluxe combines an LGA775 socket with Intel's 975X chipset, complete with Core 2 Duo support. Asus also makes a VIA P4M890-based P5V-VM DH with the old VT8237 south bridge and a generally sparser feature set.

Micro ATX Digital Home platforms are available, as well, with the N4L-VM DH covering Socket 479 mobile CPUs and the P5LD2-VM DH offering a Core 2 Duo-compatible LGA775 socket. Both of these boards are based on Intel's 945G chipset series, and they also feature PCI Express x16 slots if you want to bypass the integrated graphics.

Core 2 Duo and PCI-X support on the PW5DG2 WS Pro

Asus' MN32WS combines Socket AM2 with PCI-X

Moving to just about the polar opposite of the Digital Home, Asus also has a number of single-socket workstation boards with PCI-X slots. There are "WS" versions of the P5WDG2 with Core 2 Duo support and the nForce 590 SLI-based M2N32 for Socket AM2.

Asus also has a full line of more traditional dual-socket workstation boards, including the KFN32-D SLI. This board can handle a couple of Socket F Opterons, four DIMMs per CPU, and a pair of PCI Express x16 graphics cards. It's built around NVIDIA's latest nForce 500-based "Pro" chipset.

Socket F isn't the only new workstation platform Asus is tackling, either. The company will also play with upcoming Core-based Xeon processors on its DSGC-DW, which features a couple of 771-pin sockets, eight DIMM slots with Fully-Buffered DIMM support, and Intel's 500X chipset and 6321ESB I/O hub.

Crossfire-on-a-card

Asus does HDMI, too

Alongside its bountiful display of motherboards, Asus also showed a couple of interesting graphics cards. Crossfire gets the single-card treatment with a couple of Radeon X1600 XTs riding the EAX1600XT Dual. HDMI output will also be available on a pair of cards, one based on the GeForce 7600 GT and another on the Radeon X1600 Pro.