| AMD Tech Tour 2007 |
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The Good:
Once again this year's Tech Tour 2007 sponsors shined and had displays that were both helpful and showed off some very nice equipment. The representatives from each company took their time to talk to each and every person who had a question and demonstrate their products. The sponsors were
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Of those I just mentioned only Durabook, Tyan, MSI, Tech Data, Microsoft, Diamond, and Seagate were present at the Tampa event. The sponsors gave away awesome prizes at the end, but we shall speak about that further down.
Of all of the sonsors only Seagate and Microsoft were given time to come up on stage and talk about their products and services. Seagate offered themselves as the priemere source of security for the storage industry, a title Im certain other vendors might dispute.
Click on the Photo for a Larger Image
Click on the Photo for a Larger Image
The Bad:
The AMD Tech Tour has been known for a long time to offer the Tech Tour Bundle. The bundle is offered as an incentive for resellers and system builders to get signed up and involved in AMD's program and is usually a great way for system builders to get familiar with AMD hardware by owning a relatively high end AMD based system for much cheaper than you could otherwise purchase it. For many resellers the bottom line is very important and they will not own a decent system as the hardware is very hard to make a profit on. This year AMD selected a Tech Tour Bundle that you might find in the Grinch's Bag. The Tech Tour 2007 bundle consisted of:
- An AMD 64 X2 4400+
- An Asus M2A-VM Motherboard
- A copy of Microsoft's Windows Vista Ultimate NFR (not for resale)
All this could be yours for the price of $349. Many would say this bundle is no where near their high end of whats available from either AMD or ASUS. Microsoft has traditionally included NFR copies in of an OS in past bundles but with Vista NFR might as well stand for New Freakin machine Required as it will tie itself to the motherboard and cannot be re-installed again. AMD's 4400+ is a full six (6) cpu's down the line from the highest available AMD processor, not including FX processors or you would be a total of eleven (11) processors from the top. So no way can this $120 US processor be considered "high end", and is more like more like mid to low ranged. While we like Asus products the motherboard included in this bundle can be commonly found online for $80 and includes only one PCI-E x16 slot, 2 PCI slots and a PCI-E x1 slot and is a microATX board. Its a solid mid ranged motherboard but has no memory timings in the bios, has only one PCI-E x16 slot, and is slower than many other offerings available. That places everyone in the Tech Tour considering a bundle to find out how much they value a copy of Vista Ultimate that cannot be installed more than once, cannot be resold, and shouldn't really be paired up with the motherboard and cpu in this combo.
The Ugly:
At the end of the night as is traditional AMD gave away many prizes to attendees. Perhaps this attendee expected too much from AMD but having left their prizes to last we had hoped for something really good. Instead AMD gave away 5 AMD 4000+ socket 939 processors. These single core solutions based on a processor socket that AMD no longer even makes was a surprise. The entire event had been a long discussion of Dual core, Quad core, and how their solution offered much better performance than the competition. In the end winners walked away with a less than enthusiastic pride in AMD's prizes but then perhaps it was due to it being 10PM as well. Leveling against the ulgy was Microsoft which gave away 5 retail copies of Office 2007 Ultimate, 5 Habu Mice, A fingerprint reading wireless keyboard, and a Zune. Then Seagate gave away two portable Maxtor 2.5" drives, and Diamond Gave away an ATI X1950. With all of that AMD's prizes seemed a slight bit pale.
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