Aorus announced a new concept PC this morning, focused on making the gaming desktop almost totally wireless. It's called Project Cielo, and features modular parts. The layers, so to speak, consist of the system itself, a battery and a speaker.
“Project Cielo integrates 5G connectivity, modular design, and outstanding portability, which profiles the future of gaming," Aorus writes.
When the word modular is used in PC gaming, one tends to think of being able to easily swap parts around, and that's to be the idea of Project Cielo. But those parts aren't the components traditional PC gamers may expect. You can use any combination of the Bluetooth speaker, battery and main system together. Have headphones? Leave the speaker behind. Just want to listen to music? Sounds like you can ditch the PC altogether. Plugged in? Forget the battery.
Aorus uses the word “5G” a lot in this reveal, which is key to the whole idea of this thing being portable Aorus doesn’t go into much detail regarding this. This also makes me wonder if Aorus will forgo the conventional ethernet connection entirely in favor of 5G.
(Image credit: Aorus)
We have a bunch of questions regarding newly revealed modular PC concept. Aorus hasn't mentioned specs at all, so we have no idea, what it would use to power this design is it ever becomes a real product.
Many enthusiast PC owners expect to be able to upgrade them, but just how does that occur with Project Cielo? It’s a novel idea, however, the concept of swapping parts to change the dynamic of the PC is what I want to know more about. Can we upgrade the mainboard and the processor in the system module?Speaking of processors, will this use an AMD or Intel chip? Just how much customization is available with this concept? Does it utilize HDMI 2.1 or DisplayPort? How big is the kind of battery you need to power a gaming rig ont he go?
Like many concepts that are becoming popular to make gamers envision a possible future (and earn some marketing points), we have no idea when or if this will ever be produced. This one seems to share some DNA with Razer's Project Christine, which also focused on modules, though those were meant for easily swapping out components. That concept never showed up in its original form, though Razer argues that it brought some of it to life with the Tomahawk Gaming Desktop, which uses Intel's NUC 9 compute element for easy swapping.
This idea looks nice, at least on paper, but I wish Aorus had provided a little more than just some text and pictures. The "future of gaming" is still lacking a lot of context for enthusiasts.
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Keith Mitchell is a Contributing Writer for Tom's Hardware US. He is an IT professional during the day, and a passionate lover of video games and tech after his 9-5 grind. He has a weird affinity for Soulsborne games and plays them non-stop.
