Finally we moved away from the dark corridors of the Grand Hyatt, Taipei and moved onto Taipei 101, up several lifts to the floor reserved for Gigabyte. For those that have never visited Gigabyte at Computex, it can be quite mesmerising due to the vast array of products their produce, literally with the all the walls lined up with them.
We kick things off with the brand new and upcoming X399 AORUS Extreme motherboard which is designed for the TR4 threadripper platform and will be able to support the newly unveiled Threadripper 2 lineup of CPUs from AMD all the way up to 32 cores. Cannibalising the stacked fin design of the X470, but material has been upgraded to copper from aluminium better thermal transfer.
The motherboard features the iconic huge TR4 socket that is synonomous with the Threadripper platform as well as 8 DIMM slots. 4xPCIe slots can be seen as well as up to 3xM.2 slots. The motherboard featues the ESS Saber HiFi DAC system which is a tried and tested setup for AORUS motherboards.
The X399 AORUS Extreme’s I/O panel features up to 8 USB 3.0 ports as well as a single 3.1 port. Furthermore, 2 Wifi Antenna sockets are included for connectivity and not 1, or 2, but 3 ethernet ports! Illumination-wise, Gigabyte has removed the RGB lighting previously seen around the CPU socket and RAM slots, and have instead opted for digital lighting on the 3 big heatsinks.
The Gigabyte X399 AORUS Extreme will be available in August.
Looks can be deceiving as this little box is the Gigabyte RX580 Gaming Box, an eGPU which you can plug into your Mac laptop via Thunderbolt 3 to boost your gaming graphics potential. Released just a few months ago, the RX580 Gaming Box is much smaller than other eGPU enclosures out on the market due to the fact it already comes with an AMD RX580 graphics card inside, and a small one at that, which you cannot take out and replace with another graphics card
The enclosure itself has a HDMI 2.0 port, and three full-size DisplayPorts. On the rear are a trio of USB 3.0 type A ports, and a single USB charging port, marked in orange. On macOS High Sierra, plug the enclosure into any available Thunderbolt 3 port, and a display to the eGPU, it’s as simple as that. Nicely, the enclosure provides 87W to any connected 15″ MacBook Pro which is enough to keep the laptop powered and also means you do not need to plug in another cable.
Priced at US$599, the Gigabyte RX580 Gaming Box is not cheap, but boy does gaming with it feels good!
Gigabyte showed off a couple of budget-friendly laptops in 15″ and 17″ form factors, the Sabre 15 and Saber 17. Both use 8th-Gen Intel Core i7-8750H processors, up to 32GB of RAM, a Nvidia GeForce GTX 1050 with 4GB of VRAM, and several storage options.
Starting at US$1299, these notebooks will be launching around the beginning of September.
The AORUS AP850GM PSU is the first AORUS branded power supply from Gigabyte, and it is fully modular PSU coming with black ribbon cables. Utilising Japanese capacitors it is 80 Plus Gold certified, and a lower capacity 750W one will be available. Watch out for it to be released in July!
Gigabyte had one big area of their floor in Taipei 101 sectioned off as the AUROS Gamer’s Paradise in which they had different complete gaming systems set up to experience gaming with their hardware. Amongst all this equipment was one mod which caught everybody’s attention.
This fishtank is actually the mod which utilises immersion cooling. The heavier coolant sits at the bottom with the tank water on top of this, think water and oil reversed. As the heat from the coolant rises and touches the water’s underside surface, the water transfers the heat away, hence why you see tropical fishes in their. But we were informed that the water does not cool the coolant quickly enough, and there is a hidden water cooling system for the coolant behind the mod……but still, this is very different!
