Tom's Hardware's on-the-ground editorial team tore through day two at Computex here in Taipei. If you've ever been lucky enough to come here — as we feel we are — you'll know that this trade show is an enthusiast playground. Spread across two massive venues in different parts of the city, and spilling over into the local Grand Hyatt, there's far too much to see, even if you have all week.
We pack in what we can, tag-teaming by the various product categories we cover, and we try to see everything from the next generation of motherboards to the latest fans. You'll see much more arise out of this coverage in the next couple of days, and likely into next week. But beyond the things we can tell you about, there are product roadmaps and future plans that will find their way into our future reviews.
On day two, we moved a little further beyond some of the major announcements and dog-and-pony shows into some solid product talk. For example, now that Nvidia's GeForce GTX 980 Ti is officially out, we're seeing the graphics cards from the usual suspects, like EVGA and Zotac (the Amp! and ArcticStorm models).
On day two, AMD held a press conference to unveil Carrizo. We wrote a deep dive into the architecture of that sixth-generation APU yesterday, but AMD also showcased a handful of Carrizo notebooks, from the likes of Lenovo, Dell, HP, Acer, Toshiba and Asus.
While Intel announced a host of new Broadwell SKUs on day one, much of the anticipation is around Skylake, and in the first couple of days we've seen our fair share of Skylake motherboards, again from some of the usual suspects, including MSI, ASRock, EVGA's Z170 Classified board, and Gigabyte's Z170-HD3. I'll have to check Thomas Soderstrom's suitcase at the airport to see if he was able to walk away with any samples.
No surprise, we continue to hear that August will be the official Skylake unveiling, but most of these motherboard companies provided few details beyond the surface specifications. ASRock spent a little more time focusing on its mini PC line and its new G10 Gaming Router.
Oh, there's plenty more. We saw a dizzying number of cooling solutions (Niels Broekhuijsen spent some time getting some details and pictures of the latest developments from Noctua), but most of the change there is slow and evolutionary.
We'll unleash a truckload of storage and PSU news on you in the next few days, among other things, as Chris Ramseyer, Paul Alcorn and Aris Mpitziopoulos have been in back-to-back meetings and booth tours with some of the stalwarts in their fields. We all just need to find more hours in the day to fill you in.
Speaking of what's to come, Seth Colaner and I had a chance to see one of the most entertaining and promising VR game demonstrations we've ever witnessed: CCP Games' Disc Arena. It uses Kinect 2 for full body tracking, and the training workshop was almost as much fun as the Disc Arena game, in which Seth and I faced off against one another. But more on that later.
I also had a chance to sit down with AMD CEO Lisa Su, who is perhaps the polar opposite of Jen-Hsun Huang in person. I'll be putting together my thoughts on that conversation, which included some frank discussion of AMD's strategy.
Lest I forget, we'll present our Computex Best of Show awards at the end of the week. We're still making some final decisions there, and as always these awards are based on what we see, and the promise we think a technology holds. And sometimes just something that boggled our minds, even if it's a bit out of reach.
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