Show Girls of Computex 2017

Another year, another Computex Booth Babes. Over the years, many trade shows such as CES or E3 have seen significant reductions in the use of models AKA showgirls or booth babes to attract attention to their booths while other conferences such as the computer security focused RSA Conference has effectively banned booth babes completely. However, take a quick walk around the Computex Tapei show floor and it’s easy to see that the booth babe culture continues to remain strong in 2017.

This time, we’d like to credit David Chang of Yuki-no Photography and Rock Hsu of Research Images who have generously contributed to providing you with [...]

With the NAND shortage in full effect at CES this year, SSDs didn’t really make much of an appearance at the show. However, we did get a chance to stop by controller vendor, Phison, who had a new entry level PCIe NVMe controller to show.

The new controller is the Phison E8 which is going to be the low cost brother to the Phison E7. The new controller will come in two variants: the PS5008-E8 or PS5008-E8T.

The Phison PS5008-E8 will be a PCIe Gen 3 x2 controller featuring performance up to 1.6GB/s sequential reads and 1.3GB/s sequential writes. Random read/write performance will top out at 240K/220K IOPS respectively. It’ll also feature [...]

Patriot had more than a few cool new products to show at their suite at CES this year. Not only is it looking to improve its line of peripherals, it’s also expanding mobile storage solutions for the ever increasing volume of HD media content.

 

Patriot V730 Mechanical Gaming Keyboard

The V730 is Patriot’s new budget-friendly mechanical gaming keyboard. It features Khail Brown switches, an aluminum front plate, red LED backlighting, and an attached wrist rest. Users can choose between 6 levels of brightness and 6 lighting settings.

Although targets the budget consumer market with a price of under $70, the keyboard feels like [...]

The Samsung Odyssey lineup of gaming notebooks will be Samsung’s first attempt at a laptop designed for gaming from the ground up and at CES 2017, we had the chance of checking out the lineup for ourselves.

The Samsung Odyssey gaming notebook lineup will come in two flavors which include the 15.6-inch and the 17.3-inch versions.

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At the Samsung SSD Global Summit 2016 event in Seoul, South Korea, Samsung not only introduced two of the most highly anticipated SSDs of this year, but they also shared a number of insights into the rapidly growing industry.

Kicking off the keynote was Willow You, Director of Branded Marketing at Samsung Semiconductor who discussed a number of current SSD industry trends. Among the first is the growth of the SSD market. According to Willow You, the SSD market has grown by 54% over the past 5 years which is significantly larger than the growth of the smartphone market which has grown just 19.1% over the same period. Samsung expects this trend to continue [...]

During our stay at Computex we stopped by the Gigabyte suite and took a look at their motherboards.

GA-X99 Designare EX

The Designare series is a class of motherboards aimed at those looking for productivity, which is a very interesting step from Gigabyte. While very similar to their “Gaming” focused boards, this one has a focus on faster storage with dual SATA Express slots and support for U.2 and M.2 storage under the white shroud. It also supports the new Broadwell-E 10 core with a beefy 8+1 phase power design, which we would assume is from International Rectifier. Gigabyte boasts that with this board it won’t take a professional overclocker [...]

 

Plextor had some brand-new PCIe SSDs to show at Computex this year with fancy heatsinks and some great performance.

Plextor M8PeY

Plextor first unveiled the M8PeY at this year’s CES. This new PCIe SSD features the Marvel 88SS1093 controller and 15nm Toshiba TLC NAND. Boasting sequential read/write performance of up to 2,500MB/1,400MB/s and a random read/write performance of up to 280,000/240,000IOPS, the M8PeY is the fastest storage device Plextor has in their arsenal. Although I’m not quite sure why since the PCIe bus can provide 75w of power, it even comes with an additional SATA power connector at the top for “added power [...]

Booth Babes of Computex 2016!

As many of you have noticed, this is now the fourth Computex we’ve covered and as tradition dictates, we bring you the 2016 edition of Booth Babes of Computex!

Once again we’d like to credit our good friend, David Chang of Yuki-no photography who has helped us provide you with another glimpse of the Computex booth babe experience. As usual, if you’ve enjoyed his work, be sure to thank him by giving his Facebook page a like as well. Those who missed our Computex 2013: Best of Booth Babes Edition, Computex 2014: Best of Booth Babes Edition, or Computex 2015: Best of Booth Babes Edition be sure to check it out as [...]

For Computex 2016, we had the opportunity to tag along with Gigabyte to tour their Taiwan factory. Gigabyte’s pretty excited to show us exactly why they’re so confident in the quality of their motherboards.

Gigabyte’s factory in Taiwan is actually located in Nan Ping. It covers an area of 45,000 square meters and while it’s a relatively large factory, it isn’t the biggest factory Gigabyte owns. Gigabyte also has two more factories in mainland China, with the biggest being 60,000 square meters. This is however perceived as the “premium” factory as many OEMs specifically request components manufactured in [...]

As some of you may already know Thermaltake has been running the Thermaltake CaseMOD invitational, with a total prize pool of 15k, at their computex booth, they’ve displayed the finalists builds! One of the most interesting builds from last year is “TheTower” by the owner of WaterMod, Mathieu Heredia who gave a speech on his experience there.

“Every time I mod, I try to do something different from my other friends and modders. When I was invited to the Thermaltake CaseMOD competition, I completely rethought the Core X9. I wanted to build fully functional case with a unique design, and in the end I created Project The Tower. I was surprised when [...]