The gaming industry makes it big announcements at E3, and the consumer electronics industry parades out new tech at CES, but Computex, is when the biggest players in the PC industry roll out their biggest guns. The annual event in Taiwan always delivers news from companies like Intel, AMD and Nvidia (hello, 980 Ti!). And Computex is the best place to see the latest innovations in case design, motherboards, coolers, memory, and more. This year, we're on the ground in Taipei to get our hands on as many of them as possible.
Throughout the week, we'll be posting reports from the Computex show floor and seeing the latest PC hardware from Asus, Gigabyte, MSI, Fractal Design, Crucial, Corsair, and a heap more. You'll be able to find all of our Computex 2015 coverage in the hardware section.
If you're particularly eager to learn about any of the products at Computex this year, or curious about things that might be at the show, let us know in the comments, and we'll do our best to hunt it down. Tuesday is our first day on the show floor, but we've already gotten an early taste of the week ahead with a day zero press conference.
Computex 2015 kicked off on Monday with an opening press conference touting the size of the event: it's the second-biggest in the world behind CES, with 1702 exhibitors and more than 130,000 attendees. The press conference also highlighted Computex's annual design & innovation awards, which had 72 winners this year out of 271 entrants (1 out of 4's not bad odds, huh?). The winning entries include a lot of smartphones, tablets, and "Internet of Thing" smart devices, but there's also some exciting hardware in the PC components category. Here were a few I got to check out briefly at the press conference.
Avexir Raiden Series RAM: It takes a lot for a stick of RAM to catch my eye, but Avexir's managed to. These are some of the flashiest RAM sticks I've ever seen. According to Avexir's website, the Raiden series is some very carefully tested DDR3 RAM.
Cryorig R1 Universal heat sink: Air coolers have a hard battle against closed-loop liquid coolers these days, but sometimes you just have to appreciate the over-the-top absurdity of a top-end air cooler. The Cryorig touts especially efficient heat exchange from pipes to fins thanks to some smart soldering, but this is clearly a cooler that's as much about looks as performance.
Enermax's Digifanless 550W power supply is definitely a component I want to try out in a new PC build. It's certified 80 Plus Platinum and ventilates heat through its mesh sides, producing zero noise thanks to its fanless design. And it's digital, so you can exactly monitor your power usage through software. This is an exciting piece of tech for what's normally the most boring PC component.
ASRock Z170 Extreme 7 motherboard: A gorgeous motherboard from ASRock, this one caught my eye on design alone. But the specs are what's really exciting. The upcoming Z170 chipset for Intel motherboards should bring with it some great features. In the case of the Extreme7: USB 3.1 and DDR4 support and 32 Gb/s M.2 slots. Now all we need are the fast M.2 SSDs to go with 'em.
