Last week we had the pleasure of attending Channel Expo 09 over at the NEC.

Channel Expo is an event that is held each year at the NEC arena in Birmingham. The show hosts a wide range of technology companies, with industries showcasing software and hardware. This was my first time at the show, but from what I’ve been told over the years Channel Expo has changed quite a lot. There used to be a bigger selection of hardware companies there. Nevertheless I decided to attend.

It wasn’t very hard to find at all. At the entrance there were some bi banners and helpful staff to get you on your way.

Dell

Dell were at the show and they had quite a large booth. Inside, they had a range of laptops, desktops and server products. Overall a good booth and they had some interesting things to look at such as server backup, racks and maximum RAM capacity.

Intel

Amongst others Intel was one of the biggest names at the show. They had some nice products to show off such as the new EEE system and Atom powered laptops. They even had some arcade style F1 gaming.

Featured on the Intel booth was the Scan ‘Great White’ gaming system which hosts an Intel i7 Extreme CPU, 2x GTX285’s and 6GB of Mushkin DDR3. All this is watercooled. A very nice setup.

Meroncourt

One stall that attracted a large amount of attention at the show was Meroncourt. They had a stall filled with gaming products featuring brands such as Roccat, Speedlink, Sitecom and Mionix.

Over at Meroncourts booth was the new Roccat Kave headset along with the Roccat Valo gaming keyboard. Both these products will be available on the shelves very soon.

There was a chance to use the gaming mice, keyboards and other devices that Meroncourt sell.

Gigabyte

The Gigabyte stand was another of the popular areas at Channel Expo. They had various X58 and AM3 boards available to look at, which featured the ultra durable copper PCB’s and japanese solid capacitors. They also had a selection of current GPU’s fastened to a wall, both Nvidia and ATI – showing off the custom cooling setups on each card. The newest being the GTX275.

Along with this they had the latest Nvidia innovation the 3d gaming monitor.

Funny Stuff

Incidently the Channel Expo computer show didn’t have any booth babes this year (I’ve heard that in previous years there has been some wandering about).

But there were a few things that caught my eye.

Over at Acronis (data backup) they had a workstation propped up that had smoke coming out of it. At first glance I wondered what was going on, a few moments later the girl that stood by the tower pressed a button and more puffs of smoke came seeping out. Quite funky!

Google made an appearance at the show but there didn’t seem to be much going on there except they had a giant chocolate machine. What was funny was, people came wandering over took what they wanted and then walked off with a handful of chocolate.

ESET was one of the major companies that were present at the show, being a chief sponsor they had a very interesting stand. Towering above anything else they had a giant robot there, resembling something off I-Robot!

Altogether the show was enjoyable and it gave some insight into the future for both gaming and hardware companies that we visited. Taking into consideration the amount of companies there at the show, only a handful were computer hardware companies.

Until next time!

To discuss this article please visit our forum.