Page 1 - A Cool Introduction

Hey everyone, and welcome to another article on the CeBIT in Hannover, the 2005 edition.

CeBIT is the biggest IT exhibit and takes place in Europe every year. Roughly two million visitors and well over 8000 exhibitors are present at CeBIT. CeBIT focuses on the professional visitor, rather than the end-user. The majority of exhibitors were IT/Enterprise oriented and only handfuls in attendance were for the consumer level.

To give you an idea on how big the exhibit grounds really are try to relate to this one: take 520 football/soccer fields, place them together and that's the sheer size of the exhibit. You can imagine that such a huge exhibit has its disadvantages as you really need to make a selection of what you can or can't see. Therefore we focus purely on what was interesting for Guru3D.com, that means most of all graphics cards, mainboards and the usual nifty gadgets we ran into that made us say, ooh look that! This year I have to congratulate to organization of the CeBIT though, parking was not a mess (thank God for GPS) and the companies where all placed nicely together, so basically for Guru3D.com that meant 3-4 halls to cover.

In contrast to last year, we noticed that the economy is picking up; most companies showed off their good big-time with very large and expensive booths. There is a complaint from the industry though, as it seems (despite the really high entrance fee) that CeBIT attracts more and more consumers while this exhibit is intended for business people and press. Joe no-name needs to see the latest goodies on the CeBIT.

For me personally the experience at CeBIT is as always busy yet great. My first impression, this year there was a lot of the same stuff over and over again. The graphics cards manufacturers had cards on display that we all know and despite a few changes the most of the stuff we'll be showing you today will be familiar.

The more popular products at display that caught my eye were all kinds of new small MP3/Media players from the Asia area, iPOD and Creative Zen. Expect large amounts of cheap yet good competition, which is good for the consumer price. Also another hot trend that was clearly visible at the CeBIT was the rise of case-modification. The standard PC case is out and pimp my rig cases are hot. We have some pretty cool photos on that.

We have compiled a pictorial of over 75 images for you covering graphics cards, mainboards and other Guru3D.com related items, including some very wicked case mods. Stuff you never saw before. If you have a modem dialup, you better be prepared for some seriously long page loading time since all photos will be about 50-100kb in size with 3-4 photo's per page! This is not a high-profile difficult to read and understand article. Just easy going material and a lot of photo's.

The first few pages will have text guidance and the last part of this article will as always be a huge pictorial with product photos from the CeBIT 2005.

Have fun.