A yearly tradition for us at Hardware Upgrade is visiting CeBIT in Hanover,Germany, the largest exclusive computer and IT expo in the world. CeBIT is held every spring on the Hanover fairground. The large exhibition is quite imposing and its sheer size makes it very difficult to visit all of the company exhibits during the time allotted for the show. Add this to a massive amount of meetings and press conferences, and it is easy to see how CeBIT becomes an exhaustive time of the year for us.

Hannover Fairground: map of the CeBIT 2007 showroom floor

For us CeBIT can either be packed with exciting new products and technologies, or it may end up being rather boring with only rehashed technologies and products on display. This year, from our point of view it unfortunately ended up being the latter. The surface area of the expo was reduced this year, and the length of the tradeshow was reduced from 7 days to only 6 days, a clear indication that CeBIT is not gaining as much attention as it used to in years past. CeBIT is not the only tradeshow that is receiving less attention. For the most part, nearly all technology tradeshows have been suffering in the past few years, primarily because large manufacturers are beginning to change their perspective on the benefits of tradeshows. Tradeshows are being used less and less to introduce new products, while private launch parties have really begun gaining popularity because it allows both the press and principal clients to be present.

The World Wide Web has also contributed to the decline of the traditional tradeshow. Many of the largest manufacturers give nearly complete coverage of their products in realtime using webcasts, meaning the expense of a large exhibit at a tradeshow is starting to look much less justifiable. This also means that many journalists and individuals don’t need to travel to Hanover to see new products and can instead directly view them from the companies’ webcasts. In addition, the overall aim of CeBIT has become a tradeshow to conduct business and meet potential clients and less of a tradeshow targeted at technology enthusiasts

Cebit 2007, therefore, turned out to be a rather dull experience for us, especially in terms of video cards. The postponement of new DirectX 10 cards from NVIDIA and AMD limited the amount of new cards that we saw at the show, and for a few exceptions the cards were mostly things we had already seen. This report will cover the video cards of CeBIT. Future reports will cover other aspects of the tradeshow, including memory, motherboards, and chipsets.