Taiwan is the world's third largest source of computer products and also accounted for no less than 50% of the world's IT products that were sold last year- clearly the industry is buzzing in this part of the world. Whilst economic crisis set in last year in the rest of Asia, Taiwan instead enjoyed an annual growth rate of over 20%. That's the economics out of the way… and in layman's terms, a large proportion of your home/work PC was probably manufactured in Taiwan (motherboard, graphics card, CDROM etc.). The same can be said if you're thinking of buying a new PC this year. Computex traditionally attracts over 10,000 overseas (make that 10,002 with two SE representatives over here) visitors, with a primary focus of catering to overseas volume buyers. It's also a great event to pick up loose ends and tidbits of information regarding Intel (with the Taiwanese motherboard industry being so dominant right now).

Let's start with the 3D Accelerator stuff…

The last thing we expected to see in Taiwan were graphics board manufactures announcing Voodoo3 based products. One of 3dfx's aims when merging with STB was to put a stop to the 'brown paper bag 3dfx product'. 3dfx has not sold the chipset to any other graphics board manufacturer and is trying hard to focus upon branding. Nevertheless, there were many instances of Voodoo3 posters (and company reps donned in 3dfx T-shirts- with the new logo we might add) hanging side-by-side with TNT2 posters. Upon closer inspection it became clear that 3dfx has tried to regulate the market in this part of the world. We spoke with the Charles Tsao, VP of Sales for Skywell Technology (a previous manufacturer of Voodoo Graphics and Voodoo Banshee cards) who explained, "We merely serve as a distributor for 3dfx in Taiwan. We buy a fully boxed Voodoo3 3000 for $158 and then sell it to a Taiwanese retailer for $175. The box remains shrink-wrapped. We obviously don't make enough of a margin to be raking in a huge profit." Skywell isn't the only graphics board manufacturer in Taiwan to have this arrangement. Indeed we've also heard rumblings from several European graphics board manufactures that they were approached by 3dfx to act as an official distributor for the Voodoo3. Nothing untoward here so far.