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Dell is a global corporation that specializes in virtually every facet of the computer hardware industry. The company’s product line seems to become more extensive each year, consisting of desktop and laptop computers, servers, network switches, storage devices, computer peripherals and much more. With over 80,000 employees stationed across the globe, Dell is one of the world’s largest companies and currently ranks in the top three in computer sales.

In 1984, Michael Dell founded PC’s Limited, the company that would eventually become Dell Computer Corporation in 1988. The startup began selling IBM PC-compatible computers before selling the first of its own design in 1985: the Turbo PC. This unit was advertised for direct sale to consumers in national PC magazines. Dell custom assembled each unit ordered, offering lower prices and greater convenience than other brands that called for self assembly.

The company’s route to success was quick. In 1987, it launched its first operations in Ireland, followed up by eleven more over the next four years. By 1988, its market capitalization grew to a whopping $80 million from the initial public offering of 3.5 million shares at $8.50 per share. By 1992, Dell was listed by Fortune Magazine as one the world’s 500 largest companies.

Dell continued to excel in the computer business throughout the 1990s, passing Compaq as the largest U.S. seller of PCs in 1999. In the millennium, the company made a move to expand on its advantage by crossing over into the home entertainment and multimedia markets. Dell computers were now complemented by handhelds, digital audio players and televisions, along with a variety of printers and computer peripherals.

While its revenues have dropped over the last few years, Dell computers are still the brand of choice for millions of computer users throughout the world, indicating that this company will be around for the long haul.

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Originally founded in 1981, Creative Technology is a global leading manufacturer of digital entertainment products for the PC and internet markets. Creative Labs, its American division, was formed in 1988, followed by the opening of a European branch in 1993 and then an Asian division in 1999. For decades, its innovative products have revolutionized how users around the world interact with their computers.

Since the launch of its highly successful Sound Blaster sound card product line in 1989, Creative has been setting standards in the industry, leveraging cutting edge audio technology and a huge customer base to expand the PDE (Personal Digital Entertainment) market. While Sound Blaster started it all, the company is perhaps best known for its popular line of Zen digital audio players. The Creative Zen is an award-winning series and largely credited for ushering in the trend of MP3 players. This multipurpose device actually predates Apple’s popular iPod.

Today, Creative is a widely known as a global leader and innovator in the audio and PDE market. It solutions provide end-users with a complete digital entertainment experience from high quality hardware, software programs and services. Creative is enhancing the power of the PC with a versatile range of compatible MP3 players, multimedia speakers, headphones, portable media centers, web and digital cameras, graphics solutions and computer peripherals. Creative products and solutions are delivered to customers and system integrators through an international network that consists of traditional marketing channels, original equipment channels and the web.

This company has accomplished many industry milestones, but don’t expect them to slow down just yet. The Creative Zen is still in the stage of evolution, while other amazing lines are sure to be introduced in the very new future. A leading name in the PDE sector, Creative aims to further establish its high-quality brands for years to come.

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Connect Components LTD, better known as Connect3D, is a European memory vendor and certified AIB (Add-in Board) partner and supplier of ATI graphics cards. As a major distributor, the company operates offices in England, Germany and Sweden. The company had begun to branch out in the United States and the Middle East as well. Recently, however, it has been widely speculated that Connect3D is no longer in the business of marketing ATI graphics cards.

Much isn’t known about the origin or history of Connect3D. However, it is known that the company was a leading provider of the complete line of ATI graphics cards. Connect3D actually leveraged its own engineering expertise to develop ATI powered Radeon add-in boards from its manufacturing locations in Europe in China. It has been said that there was a time when the company produced well over 600,000 ATI graphics cards per month.

During 2007, bankruptcy rumors began to circulate about the company’s finances and future in the business. In addition, the company was in the midst of major controversy when it failed to honor rebates on Connect3D graphics cards sold through the online vendor Buy.com. Numerous customers attested to reports of receiving email responses stating that the delays were due to issues with the company’s distributor. Some customers say they received no response at all. In the same year, a Better Business Bureau report claimed that the company had gone out of business. After paying out some of the rebates on its own behalf, Buy.com filed a lawsuit against Connect3D.

It still isn’t clear whether Connect3D is completely defunct or if ill fate just struck its American branch. Although the website is still active, it appears as if the company no longer sells ATI graphics card online. This is compounded by the fact that all driver downloads and other support inquires are directed to ATI/AMD website.

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Headquartered in Industry, California, PowerColor was birthed in 1997 from Tul Corporation.
Since then, PowerColor has become an industry leading brand name and is one of the largest graphics card producers in the world. Though perhaps best known for its impressive line of PowerColor graphics cards, the company also manufactures and markets motherboards, gaming cases, power supplies and a wide variety of multimedia products. PowerColor has established subsidiaries in the U.S., Taiwan, Mainland China and the Netherlands, leveraging the technical expertise of skilled R&D teams and FoxConn, the world’s largest manufacturer of computer components

PowerColor is a licensed manufacturer of ATI graphics cards and also produces NIVIDIA-based cards under the Zogis brand name. The company targets a diverse market by delivering high quality solutions that range from low-end cards for standard work stations to high-end products for demanding gaming applications. Through a close business partnership with FoxConn, PowerColor is able to modify the specifications of its cards, allowing customers to enjoy products with a higher level of power than those designed by ATI or even competitors like Sapphire Technology.

PowerColor graphics cards have been a major hit over the years. In 2004, the company was honored with at least 10 awards each month from the global industry’s most esteemed IT organizations and media. Its outstanding line of products garnered recognition from the Ministry of Economic Affairs of the R.O.C. with the 2005 Taiwan Symbol of Excellence Award, an accolade based on the core values of Design and Innovation, Quality System, Market and Brand Awareness. This prestigious award signifies honor for some of the highest quality, ground breaking products in the market.

PowerColor looks to maintain its position as a global leader by continuously marketing the best products available, complimenting them with cost efficiency, fast delivery and excellent customer support.

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Headquartered in Tokyo, Japan, Toshiba Corporation is a multi-international company and a global leader in the manufacturing and marketing of electronics products. As one of the early technological pioneers, its massive product line has evolved to span communications systems and equipment, social and industrial infrastructure systems, network solutions and household appliances. Also specializing in the chip business, Toshiba semiconductors stand among the world’s top 20 in sales and performance. The company itself is one of the world’s largest PC manufacturers, coming in fifth only behind Hewlett Packard, Dell, Acer and Lenovo.

Toshiba was originally founded in 1939 but its history dates back to the late 1800s. It was initially established from the merging of two companies: Tanaka Seizosho, which was founded in 1875, and Hakunetsusha, founded in 1890. It was not given the official name Toshiba Corporation until 1978. The company expanded rapidly through internal growth and acquisitions, investing heavily in engineering and industry firms to form subsidiaries in the electrical equipment and chemical fields among other sectors. Over the years, it has introduced a number of Japanese firsts. Some of Toshiba’s innovations include the TAC digital computer in 1954, the microwave oven in 1959, the laptop PC in 1996 and HD DVD in 2005. The quality of Toshiba chips made it one of the most successful semiconductors during the 1980s and that momentum has carried on to the current day. As of 2007, it was the third most profitable chip maker behind Intel and Samsung.

Today, Toshiba maintains its position as an industry leader with a diverse range of products and in-house companies. Some of the most notable divisions include Toshiba Laptops, Digital Products Group, Infrastructure Systems Group and Toshiba TEC Corporation. With regional headquarters located in Asia, Europe and the Americas, this company and their nearly 160,000 global employees available to keep the world thriving from the latest innovations.

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Based in Taipei, Taiwan, TwinHan designs, produces and markets a wide variety of digital television solutions. The company has an extensive product line that includes digital TV reception cards, TV tuner cards, set-top boxes and personal computers. It also offers a number of services that aid in visual data processing, compression, encoding and decoding, IC and RF design, digital terrestrial video broadcasting, hardware design and system integration. TwinHan has an estimated 160 employees, more than half of them highly skilled in research and development, as well as facilities in Mainland China, Europe and the United States.

First established in 1996, TwinHan has been highly successful in its endeavors. The company achieved ISO 9001 certification in 1999 and helped to spark the FTA (Free-to-Air) revolution in 2001 with the launch of Taiwan’s first digital satellite TV card. In 2003, it released the popular TwinHan DVB-T series that allowed users to view DVB-T programming on their displays, record them to hard disk and burn them onto DVD media. The early DVB-T line included the DTV Mini Ter card and DTV Alpha memory stick, each of which offered excellent video quality at high resolution and support for HDTV reception. The TwinHan DVB-T series became more impressive in 2005 with USB and analog TV solutions among other products to enhance the digital viewing experience for PC users. That same year, the company received numerous industry honors including the Best Buy logo from CHIP Germany and the Editors Choice Award by Notebook Organizer & Handy, two of the most prestigious computer magazines in Germany.

TwinHan plans to further cement itself as a leader in the digital TV industry by expanding its portfolio to suit other markets. It appears as if the company is making good on those intentions as many of the products in its DVB-T line now offer support for both Macintosh and Linux platforms.

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Based in Fremont, California, S3 Graphics is a top provider of graphics visualization technologies for desktop and notebook PC sectors. One of the major suppliers to the OEM and retail markets, S3’s products offer cutting edge efficiency to home, corporate and multimedia platforms to provide the end-user with enhanced visual features. While not as dominant as it once was, the company remains stable in the market with its S3 brand of graphics accelerators. This series rivals competitors, such as ATI Radeon and GeForce product lines.

S3 Graphics was founded and incorporated in 1989 as S3 Incorporated, going public on the NASDAQ Stock Exchange in 1993. Though successful as an independent startup company, it struggled with the transition to the integrated 3D card segment. Remodeling itself as a consumer electronics company, S3 sold off its major graphics division in a merger with VIA Technologies. The new company was very profitable and even made a successful investment in UMC, a semiconductor foundry based in Taiwan. In 2000, S3 became SONICBlue, changing the name and NASDAQ stock symbol as well. SONIC set its focus on the consumer electronics market, enjoying tremendous success with brands such as ReplayTV, GoVideo and the Rio line of portable multimedia players. It also produced graphics accelerators for the home-based PC market under brand names such as Deltachrome, Gammachrome and Chrome.

Although SONICBlue filed for bankruptcy in 2003 and folded shortly thereafter, the company’s graphics divisions were previously sold to VIA Technologies as S3 Graphics. The technology behind this world famous brand has helped to set many of the trends seen on the market, including the world’s first single chip GUI (Graphical User Interface) accelerator in 1989. Today, S3 Graphics cards are among an impressive lineup of integrated processors and embedded technologies that deliver world-class performance to the home and business markets.

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Headquartered in the Silicon Valley of Taiwan, Realtek Semiconductor Corp. is a leading provider of computer components, network devices and multimedia products. The company designs, manufactures and sells a wide range of products that are mainly categorized in two divisions: Communications Network ICs and Computer Peripheral and Multimedia ICs. Some of the products in its line of network solutions include network interface controllers, traditional Ethernet controllers, network switch controllers and gateway controllers, among others. Realtek currently has approximately 900 employees, more than 700 of them well versed in the research and development field.

Realtek was founded in 1987 and listed on the Taiwan Stock Exchange in 1998. One of its early successes was the RTL8139 series of Ethernet controllers released in the late 1990s, a line that dominated the market for many years. These products fell into the peripheral and multimedia category, consisting of traditional audio codecs, high definition codecs, clock generators, card reader controllers and LCD controllers. The most notable Realtek controllers were the 10/100M Ethernet line, having a global market share of 70% in 2003. Its AC97 audio codecs also claimed 50% of the market. Today, its ALC850 and RTL8139 are favorites on the OEM market, offering standard features and low prices. In Asia, the RTL8139 Realtek NIC is often referred to as a crab card, alluding to the crab-like appearance of the company logo.

Realtek has announced on numerous occasions that it would dedicate its R&D resources and expertise to other areas in the future. Some of the markets the company is considering include digital television, along with more advanced wireless technologies such as UWB (Ultra Wide Band) and the proposed 802.11n standard. It appears as if Realtek is gearing up for the highly anticipated myriad of concepts and applications that have been proposed to advance existing and newly emerging technologies.

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Headquartered in Taipei, Taiwan, Tyan Computer Corporation is a world renowned manufacture of motherboards. The company plays an integral role in powering the network environment as many of its models are designed for AMD and Intel processors. Specializing in high-end desktop and server platforms, its products are sold worldwide to OEMs, system integrators and resellers for a wealth of applications. Tyan’s high-performance products are powered by the more than 12,400 employee strong global workforce of MiTAC, the company it was acquired by in March of 2007.

Tyan got its start back in 1989, which appeared to be just the right time. Its founder saw tremendous opportunity in the SMP server market and established the company to fill a much needed void. Tyan began developing, producing and supplying Intel Pentium series motherboards along with several other single-processors targeted at server applications. Since that time, the company has manufactured a number of single, multi and multi-core chips using technologies from companies such as AMD, Broadcom, Intel and NVDIA among others. The impressive design of Tyan motherboards has gained the company numerous honors over the years, including two Maximum PC Kick-Ass Awards for its contributions in the Dream Machine project. Its cutting edge innovations have also helped several partners and customers earn recognition in their respective industries.

If the success of Tyan motherboards wasn’t enough, the brand name became even stronger once it merged with MiTAC, a Taiwanese company that manufactures a wide range of computer products. The MiTAC portfolio includes servers and network products, notebook PCs and outsourced manufacturing services. With the merger, its corporate headquarters in Fremont, California became the North American headquarters. Tyan is currently the company’s leading brand, acting as the engineering and marketing core for the delivery of server and workstation products designed for MiTAC’s worldwide partners and OEM customers.

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VIA Technologies is a fabless semiconductor company headquartered in Taipei, Taiwan. The company supplies the highly efficient x86 processor platforms that power the personal computer, client, embedded and ultra mobile markets. Its main product line consists of motherboard chipsets, memory and CPUs, energy-saving solutions that provide enhanced connectivity for an array of computing, networking, communications and multimedia platforms. Best known for its awarding line of VIA chipsets, the company also produces audio and network controllers, low-power processors and chipsets for CD/DVD writers. Over the years, VIA has achieved international reach with state of the art production facilities throughout North America, Europe and Asia. Its client base includes global leading OEMs, system integrators and consumers around the world.

VIA was officially established in 1987 from the Symphony Company, a computer company based in the Silicon Valley of Taiwan. The founder, Wen Chi Chen, was an Intel employee before joining Symphony, where he still presides as CEO. In the late 1990s, the manufacturer focused on diversifying its core logic solutions and has since acquired a number of subsidiaries. Some of its most notable acquisitions include a CPU division, a sound division and a graphics division acquired from S3 Graphics. With Taiwan’s manufacturing sector constantly increasing the level of integration and functionality in chipset products, these divisions have helped VIA remain afloat in the competitive core logic market.

Coupled with the S3 Graphics merger, the company has been able to hold onto a respectable share of the PC graphics market due to the efficiency of their VIA graphics cards. In 2008, the company announced the launch of official 2D accelerated drivers for Linux chipsets with 3D accelerated drivers in the works. Just releasing the VX855 Media System Processor, a fully integrated all-on-one chip designed for mobile PC systems, VIA looks to take its innovative ways into another decade of success.

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