On the secod day it was raining in Hannover. The aftenoon a storm came by and at the evening we survied a snowstorm on the highway.  Anyway, it was an interresting day on which we formost visited Barebone and Mini-ITX manufactures and could witness one or another news.

Epox is producing the EX5 Series now for about a year where as they where never really available on the market. Since the  model stayes for Pentium 4 socket 478 and AMD Athlon XP for socket A not many changes have taken place. Some difficulties hindered the company to focus more on the barebone line. But from now on Epox wants to take part in the Barebone market and promises to bring forth new models with better chipsets and CPU.

Abit, a manufacturer that had so far only Barebone (DigiDice)  to offer, could present this year nothing at all in this line. Acoording to the reports of the Abit technicians there will be a complete new Barebonesystem released on the market. Concearning the casing shapes we have been asked to keep silent.

Just next to Abit nVidia had posted their sylish booth. One of the products that stood out was a home theatre PC with nVidia PureVideo Technologie that should provide high resolution videopeasure . Further technological information are not known.

At Aopen a "grand" AV-barebone was the attraction. A Media Center unit in Hi-Fi format was proudly introduced. Behind the scenes we could see a Pentium M Barebone in Half-Cube Format that has by the way the same mainboard as the Modell EY-855. According to the information of a Aopen technician from the Netherlands alls barebones for Socket LGA775 have the same mainboard and casing frame. Only the outer skin and the frontside are chnaged and the bios is flashed. On request customers can have it transfomed to a EX-915 or AV-2 modell with LCD display. This strategy saves productioncosts and helps to avoid supplyconstrictions. Also new is a whole row of stylish TFT flatpanels.

At the taiwanesien graphiccard manufacturer XGI stood out a whole line of passiv cooled graphiscards that could become highly interresting for quiet barebones. The low price and the adequate performance even raise the atractiveness. Brandnew, but not ready for the series is a model (Volari 8300) for PCS-Express which is also passiv cooled. The port is not for the SLI-Mode, but a LVDS-output for dgital flatpanels.

At Gigabyte we where friendly welcomed from Marc Yang, who introduced us to the newes products. Besides several new mainboards with nForce4 chipset and a large selection of graphiccards Gigabte has presented a new Barebone in BTX format. This barebone allows the mounting of all components without screws while it is a very massive stelel casing.  The last year presented HA1 MedieCenter was this time in a revised and funktional version available. Gigabyte presents also their wide notebook line of which we have tested the N203 12" Ruby Red before. New is a modell with Sonoma platform and another very thni subnotebook, which is not completely finished yet. Finaly Marc Yang showed us the new line of Gigabyte: cellphones! They present two different cellphoned in different colors that are not funktional so far.

At the audiomanufacturer Creative everything turned around portable MP3 players. The new Zen Micro Touch Photo can show digital photos and play MP3 and WMA filed and competes directly with the iPod Photo from Apple. The Oled Display has the characteristics of a wide viewing angle and low powerconsumption so that musicpleasure can be sustained for over 12 hours. Colours are in at Creatives so that for every taste and season the matching player is available. A further highlight is  the PMS player, that can show videos on it's display.

At the VIa pressconference where the new Via Epia DP (dualprocessor) with two Eden ESP processors  was presented. At the booth we could see the Epia SP, which will be available for consumers in april. The small Epia N Nano-ITX which was presented at the last CeBIT looks quite ready for series production and shall be on the market in summer 2005. But with Via you never know - so we hope, that this promise will be truely fulfilled. The press spokesman assured that Via will be more careful with anouncements in the future. Besides the Epia-N the Epia-NL wil also be provided which managed without ports on the backside. "Luke Corefusion" unites the new Via CN400 Chipset and the last generation of the Via Eden ESP processors in one aluminiumpackage and is one further step in the direction of miniaturizing. The press spokesman told us, that through the "Luke Corefusion" even smaller mainboards than the Nano-ITX can be produced.

Bad news from Jetway. Due to very low request the manufacturer gets off the barebonemarket completely. The goal is to focuse more on TFT and mainboards. Even though this company is not very famous, they were one of the first manufacturers with barebones in the production line. We wish Jetway best wishes in the reorientation process.

The Via partner presents today the new T2 system with Via Epia SP mainboard. New in the T2 is a cooling unit for the harddisc that should prevetn demages inside the case because of to high temperature. The new T4 is not fully gastated, but has a very interesting design.

Astoundingly Acorp brought only one barebone to the exibition that is seemingly equipped with a Socket 775. Some contraversies inside their team gave us reason to doubt, that it is already a model for the socket LKA775 and Intel 915G chipset. The TV-PC is run by a Embedded Mainboard with Via C3 Processor and performes multimedia funktions straight from the bios. This bios  was deployed before in the ITX-systems from Insight Solutons.

Skyhawk offers a series with extraordinary barebones some of them with integrated 7" TFT display. Some of these Barebone models we have seen already last year at Epoxs' boot.  The products are maily put on the market under the name of other companies like Acorp and Jetway. Models with AMD Athlon64 processors should be developed soon.

Unicorn was represented in hall 22 like last year. Again the company exibited ITX-mainboards for the industry. Models with Via C3 processors as well as Intel Pentium 3/4 based models are presented. The product line was extended through mainboards with Ultra Low Voltage CPUs from Intel.