Just a heads up, if you buy something through our links, we may get a small share of the sale. It’s one of the ways we keep the lights on here. Click here for more.
Prepare yourselves – the RGB season is upon us. It’s not quite E3 with all the gaming goodness it entails, but this week has a bumper serving of glows, chills and more tech than you can shake a selfie stick at. That’s right, Computex 2018 is upon us, and since the public facing part of the show starts in a few hours in Taiwan it’s time to talk about what to expect.
In years past, Computex has served as the launching ground for major PC hardware announcements like new graphics cards and processors, but we should not expect any such announcements this year. AMD and Intel both just released new processor families so it’ll most likely be the fall of this year before any more announcements come from them.
On the graphics card side, there might be one or two custom boards from AMD’s partners, probably the Nano Vega that we’ve seen teased from Powercolor. Nvidia’s CEO Jensen Huang was asked about new lines of cards at their presser event yesterday, and his response was to say “the hardware won’t show up for a ‘long time.'”
While it might seem the event will be a bit boring without a bunch of hardware announcements from the big guys, Computex is the world’s biggest PC hardware show so there’ll be plenty of interesting things to gaze at. New motherboards are very likely to be here, possibly the new Z390 series from Intel that the rumor mill has been whispering about.
There will also be the latest in cases, peripherals, PSUs, and heck, basically anything that you can stick RGB LEDs onto. There’s also going to be lots of smaller companies with plenty of zany gadgets and drones.
Here’s what to expect (and what not to expect) from Computex 2018 this year.
When is Computex 2018?
Dates: June 4 – June 9.
What to expect
- A whole slew of new Asus ROG gear, including some surprises.
- Cases from Phanteks, makers of some of the best PC cases, like the Enthoo Evolv.
- New cases and more from Corsair: Cases, RAM, and peripherals will be abundant.
- New Ryzen and Coffee Lake motherboards: Ryzen 2 is brand new, so we should see more x470 boards, the new b450 range, and probably some SFF variants. Coffee Lake is more established, which will likely mean only a few new models, but likely some specialized mini-ITX and high-end ATX boards.
- Crazy case mods: Modders worldwide have been beavering away to make some spectacular builds, we hope to showcase as many as we can.
- New 802.11ax Wi-Fi: This is a new Wi-Fi standard that’s just emerging this year. We expect a few routers to debut at Computex, but expect device support to be lagging – there’ll be few devices that will support the new standard until 2019 or 2020. After all, 802.11ad still doesn’t have many supported devices yet.
- Way, way too much Blockchain – this might be subjective as it’s not going away, so we’ll be cherry-picking which tokens and services are interesting.
- With the Computex coverage not mentioning any reveals from AMD – and the company teasing a “never-before-seen hardware,” could this be new GPUs? Threadripper 2? Navi? We’ll have to wait and see on Wednesday.
What not to expect
- No big reveals from Nvidia, their presence at Computex is much reduced from previous years so don’t expect the 1100-series GeForce announcement this week.
- No new CPU reveals from either AMD or Intel – both chipmakers recently released new ranges so expect to see motherboards but no new chips. One exception might be from Intel’s camp, with the reveal of the rumored 40th-anniversary 8086k tribute chip.
What do you think? Are our thoughts in line with yours? Let us know what you’d like to see this year at Computex 2018 in the comments.
Follow us on Flipboard, Google News, or Apple News
