Shaam 2005 Part I

Now after a nice break I’m relaxed and refreshed and I can return to my normal habits which include blogging, as I promised in my last post here’s my experience of Shaam 2005:


A bit of a History
As a hardware enthusiast I’ve always complained about the lack of high end products in the market, and the expensive prices of them in case they became available, during the last year and as a part of my work I had several meetings with the major distributors and told them my point and heard their side of the story, to make a tall story short I urged them to order high end products in small quantities and I convinced them how the market is evolving and more people are searching for high performance, and luckily they were submissive and this year’s Expo proves it.

Concerning Hardware this year’s Expo was a huge change, nearly all of major brands (Asus, MSI, Gigabyte) has ordered high end products especially for the Expo and especially for our lab, this brings us to the Issue of Al Rakameiat Test lab which was my responsibility during the Expo.

The Test lab:
As Casual Readers know we do various reviews and group tests in the newspaper, and wanted in this Expo to give all the users a taste of it, so assembled 10 PCs nearly all of them were top of the line concerning hardware and we supplied each PC with the whole suite of our Benchmarks and testing Software, we made all those PCs available for the attendees to do experiments with them and we were there to answer their questions and inquiries, and we did a lot of live demonstrations upon people’s requests and questions,

-We compared Pentium 4 to Athlon 64 in various applications.
-We demonstrated how cooling is important for high-End CPUs.
-We performed live overclocking, and we proved how much performance you can get from it
-We demonstrated the difference in games between Mid-Range Graphic Cards and High-End ones
-And so on…

We told the Major distributors about the concept of our lab prior to the Expo and they were all very enthusiastic about it and supplied us with more than enough Mid-Range and High-End Products to fill a dozen PCs, our top PC was a blast to see and experiment with, all the time people were gathering around it waiting for their turns to experiment and play with it, and here’s the specification of it:

-AMD Athlon 64 4000+ (the fastest CPU in the world).
-Asus Star Ice Cooler (Special Cooling for the CPU) it’s definitely the biggest cooler you’ll ever see, it was really the star of our show everybody was stunned by the view of it.
-Asus A8N-SLI (one of the best Motherboards with SLI Technology which gives it the ability to run two Graphic Cards in parallel)
-Dual Asus GeForce 6800 GT 256MB GDDR3 (2x of the best Graphics Cards around)
-Dual (RAID 0) 74.3 GB Western Digital Raptors 10.000 RPM (the best Hard Disk installation in the world and the most expensive too)
-BenQ 26in LCD-TV (very beautiful colors yet very expensive)

Our other Hardware was amazing too, we had Gigabyte 3D1, it consists of Gigabyte SLI motherboard and a Graphics Card with Dual-Cores GeForce 6600GT (the only one in the world), we were running it on Athlon 64 3500+, All of Pentium 4 Equipped PCs were based upon the new Socket LGA 775 and half of them were running PCI-Express Graphics Card.
We assembled all of our Hardware inside glass cases so that everybody can see the hardware running all the time.

The result (thank god) was a huge success to our lab, everybody was more than pleased and many of them told me that our hall was the best thing in the whole Expo, and you can expect how our hall was crowded nearly all the time and we barley had time to breathe, in the first day we didn’t have time for lunch.

That's it for now, I've said enough for the time, next I'll try to talk about the Expo in general but that's another stroy for another post.

Technorati Tags: Expo - Hardware - Shaam 2005