Computex news roundup

Computex is the world’s biggest PC show, so it is natural to see all of the vendors bring their “A game” to it. It seemed like now it’s over it would be a good time to summarize all the important news.  This particular Computex was super exciting because we had two of the biggest CPU vendors showing off their best and biggest products to date!

Intel

Intel made a big splash with its announcement of 28 Core CPU aimed at the HEDT market.  While Intel has had large core count CPU’s for the server market for sometime, they’ve been restricted to just that market with lower clocks and high prices.

The processor at the demo was overclocked to an amazing 5Ghz on all cores, but Intel neglected to mention that it was overclocked and plenty thought the CPU would at least be be 5GHz on a single core like the new 8086 CPU.

The processor has a 6 channel memory as well as an insane VRM setup:

You have seen it right, that is a 30 phase VRM! The motherboard for this has 4x 8pin connectors. That means up to 600W delivery only through those CPU power connectors, but in reality it will be a whole lot more when overclocked like this. The previous gen 18 core CPU managed to draw 1KW when overclocked and this is going to beat that by a land slide! For reference this system had a low power GPU and a 1600W PSU, and the chiller that was there to cool the CPU was rated for 1700W.

Two prototype motherboards have been designed for this CPU at least, the one Intel showed was from Gigabyte, but the other was from Asus under their ROG brand.  This was branded as “DOMINUS” and built into a custom rig by L3P.  The motherboard was giant and to be honest a bit ugly as it look like it had been quickly converted from an Asus 2P workstation board without the usual ROG attention to Aesthetics.

More news from Intel was the release of i7-8086K 50th anniversary CPU. The CPU is same model as 8700K, just running at 5 Ghz on a single core out of the box. The CPU is advertised as first 5GHz CPU, but it isn’t. The AMD FX 9590 was actually first CPU to be shipped at 5Ghz and it included an AIO cooler in the package.

The CPU is going to be sold in limited production run with 50K units.  Given that at best it is a binned 8700K then you’ll have to decide if it’s worth it to spend the extra money, of course you can also buy a binned 8700K from Silicon Lottery instead.

AMD

AMD were also busy at Computex, where they have made two new announcements for their Ryzen and VEGA products:

• Ryzen ThreadRipper has seen an overhaul and the new ThreadRipper based on Zen+ uArch will now go up to 32 cores! That’s currently highest number of cores in the HEDT space, as well as in server family of products. The CPU has 250W TDP and because the whole DIE is distributed over a large area, it can be air-cooled (at least according to AMD).  We struggled to cool a fully loaded a first gen threadripper even on water cooling when trying to get all cores to run at ~4GHz.
  

AMD achieved 32 cores by activating the remaining two dies.  The first gen Threadripper only has 2 out of 4 dies activated so it maxes out at 16 cores, but clearly this was always the plan as soon as power was manageable and each Threadripper 2 die is a bit lower in power than the first gen.  Given the extra dies the latency with the infinity fabric may be a little larger and so single core performance may suffer slightly.  As usual there is still a tradeoff between high core count cpus and single threaded performance, but we are glad that AMD is competitive enough to scare Intel into action showing such an early prototype of their own HEDT solution.  Intel beat Threadripper 1’s performance on their X299 platform if you ignore price, their 18 core solution was faster in multicore and singlecore.  Their 28 core part may still beat Threadripper 2, particularly on single core performance, but again we doubt that the Intel part will be any less than 2x the cost of Threadripper 2.  If it sounds like we’re mad at Intel, well let’s just say that like NVidia, it’s been a long time that they’ve milked the enthusiast market and given us the minimal possible at maximum prices.  We are glad to see competition.

Another demo was the new Server CPU based on Zen2 arcitecture and 7nm LP node, but there weren’t any specs… just this picture

The CPU is now at AMD’s lab and it will be ready for shipping in 2019

• VEGA on 7nm was also shown. AMD is targeting the Machine Learning/AI and professional users. The GPU has a 32GB of HBM2 memory and looks like this:

It is the first AMD GPU to feature Infinity Fabric, but we dont know yet how it will be implemented. Would it be something like MCM package found in Ryzen or something like NVswitch? There are not enough details yet to know.

• VEGA Nano- Interestingly this isn’t AMD made, but rather made by PowerColor, the Asian AIB partner of AMD

The card features VEGA 56 silicon and it is in ITX form factor. So far we dont know how long it is. The price is expected to be around 449 USD.

Noctua

The last company that has opted not to follow RGB crazyness, Noctua, is updating its cooler and bringing more colors to its fan and heatsink lineups.

For the first time ever, we see a whole black heatsink from Noctua! As a part of their cromax linup of fans, Noctua is intorducing some new models

Overall, we highy like what Noctua did. No unnecessary RGB, just plain old colors.

Also there are few accessories like PWM fan hub, desk fan and  24V to 12V DC-DC step-down converter. That could be useful if you want to power 12V fans from a 24V source like powerbrick.

 

In-win

In win is the brand that always has something interesting to show off and they never disappoint. This Computex was no different.

In-win 307 is a new addition to In-win’s 300 series case. It has integrated 144 pixel “display” in its front, RGB lighting and tempered glass.

 

The diplay is programable and you can write pretty much anything on it, as long as you keep in mind the 8×18 pixels grid

But the start of the show was In-win’s new premium case, the Z-frame.

Coming in black and silver and having good watercooling support, In-win’s Z-frame is a real piece of art. Its open air design indicates a true successor of previous “frame” cases.

EKWB

EK pulled of a move of a surprise when it showed many new and upcoming products.

Wooden blocks

New and classy wooden blocks look gorgeous, while keeping the standard EK look in them.  This was a big surprise as water and wood don’t normally mix of course.  EK seem to be trying to support more custom mods as they mentioned more customization in future.

More Vardar Fans

While the original Vardar was modelled after the Gentle Typhoon, we’ve since seen EK expand the line up with more colors and then RGB.  Now they have tweaked the design again with chunky rubber corners, a new rotor design and RGB lighting.

EK also introduced their CryoFuel solid coolants.

The word “solid” is what is really interesting as they had introduced Cryofuel before, and have had pastel collants for some time before that. EK has worked on these coolants to make them more stable and able to keep any sediment from settling as well as being thermally conductive and thus suited for WaterCooling systems.  Generally claims of better cooling rely on running a far higher temperature delta on the coolant than most PC users would be happy with. After all a 2% decrease in Delta T doesn’t matter if your Delta T is 5C for example.

The most interesting part of EK’s booth was the successor to the famous Supremacy EVO coldplate design!

EK calls it “Velocity”

We don’t have any info so far on the block, but it should bring more thermal improvements and take the performance crown for EK.  While EK’s previous core was decent, it usually performed at the top of the competition when the mount was perfect.

 

EVGA

From PSUs to motherboards, EVGA brought their A game to the show

There is an updated X299 Micro 2 board with better VRM cooling and some minor board improvements.  Sadly though the VRM cooling has a small fan on it which usually means ugly noise.  Otherwise though we’ve been a fan of EVGA’s Micro boards, there’s very little need for a full ATX board these days for any normal budget and so these boards offer not only good value, but realistically everything you need.

In a while, we havent seen a motherboard with non Z/X chipset in EVGA’s offering, but it lloks like we are getting one soon with the B360 Gaming.  This seems to show that EVGA has firmly recovered from the motherboard woes that dogged the early x79 boards and can now expand out of their core demographic.

The “SuperNova” PSU family form EVGA always brought very solid PSUs at decent price and performance. EVGA just confirmed that by adding more units to its offering. There are two new PSUs:

2000W

Presumably the 2000W is aimed at miners, hardcore oc’ers and those with deep learning/AI/compute systems.

850W – this one is less interesting even though this kind of wattage is really the mainstay of most gamers.

And another PSU – this time one that broke the record for the smallest 1000W PSU is EVGA’s Super G7!

It is going to be offered in two variants with Gold and Platinum ratings.  Hopefully we also see it in a SFX style package as well as just a short ATX supply.