Lincoln said he thought our last few front page headlines were boring, so here’s Super Exciting edition of our Computex 2012 day three wrap-up.
That thing you see above was a freaking awesome transparent display; this wasn’t even a product being featured, it’s just the advertising kiosk. I thought it was awesome. Samsung was also showing off what I can only describe as a chat service that is almost exactly like Nintendo’s Swapnote, except it runs on any device. If you like the idea of sending drawings of boners to your friends, I guess it’s cool.
Day three began with a stop at the Lian Li booth in Nangang. Some of the stuff was weird, some of it was awesome. A day in the life of Lian Li. Remember the PC-888?
GENIUS
After that I visited with Genius. Genius is a company that is more well-known for office computing products than consumer PC stuff, but that’s changing. They’ve launched a series of gaming peripherals branded GX Gaming that will hopefully take their years of expertise and translate it successfully to a new market.
The GX Gaming lineup is a good first attempt; the branding is consistent and the products look good. They showed the DeathTaker mouse, the Maurus mouse, the Cavimanus headset, the Imperator keyboard, and two different mousing surfaces. I’ll be honest: Genius needs to step it up on the innovation side to compete in the US market, especially in an absolute sea of competition, but their heart is in the right place and if they can stick it out and iterate a couple of more generations, they could very well be a serious competitor to some more well-known brands. Oh: but the mousepads were actually really damned good on the feel side of things: those, I will heartily recommend.
A bit more impressive were Genius’ audio accessories: headsets, Bluetooth speakers, and desktop speakers. They had a really slick Bluetooth audio adapter; you simply plug your home or desktop speakers into it and tether your mobile or other Bluetooth-enabled device to it, and voila; instant wireless speakers. The SP-900BT Bluetooth-enabled portable speakers were also very nice. As an added bonus, they come in two color schemes that would fit in perfectly with an Android or iOS device.
PNY
I also wandered by the PNY booth, which was refreshingly natural-looking in a sea of white, steel, and flashy LED-blasted booths. Their focus was definitely on showing off their HP partnership (PNY manufactures HP-branded USB memory sticks). They also had a small display of new products, including a wide variety of USB sticks and high-speed SDHC memory. My favorite was a sleek USB stick that also served as a bottle opener keychain. I really didn’t get what they were trying to communicate here, though… it was one of the most eye-catching booths on the showfloor, with a giant wooden windmill and haybales… but they weren’t really showing much.
ADATA
The next stop was ADATA. Now this is a company that excites me. Their product lineup is solid, they’re working hard to make a bigger splash in the North American market, and I think they’ve got the right stuff. Our recent review of the SX900 SSD told a surprising story: Here’s an SSD that actually differentiates itself and stands out in a sea of SSDs (and there were literally dozens of SSD manufacturers on the showfloor this year). It’s a drive with competitive performance but also 0% over-provisioning: meaning it has more capacity than its peers. They’re so confident in the stability of their 0% OVP solution that their upgraded model (the SX910) offers a full five-year warranty.
Next I wandered over to the Grand Hyatt… well, by wandered, I meant take the MRT (Taipei Metro) and walk a lot, dripping sweat in the dense humidity and tropical heat. I got there relatively early for my appointment, so I dropped in on our friends at Corsair for an impromptu visit.
Corsair
The Corsair suite was showing some impressive (in true Corsair fashion) stuff, including a new line of DSP-controlled power supplies (the PSU circuitry is “smart”… it’s programmable and can also communicate with your PC via software they’re developing). The software was alpha quality, but you can definitely see where they’re going with the concept. You’ll be able to not only see temps and loads on individual rails, but also set various power profiles and control the PSU at a level never before possible (at least reasonably) in enthusiast computing.
They also spent time showing me their new fans, and telling me about the wind tunnel they purchased for testing and design refinements. They put many of their competitors’ fans in their new wind tunnel as well, and found that many competitors’ advertised numbers were, well… not quite as scientific as they should have been. All of their new fans feature wind tunnel-tested designs, and are divided into purpose-specific product lines with design profiles specific for different use cases. In tight spaces such as butted up to a radiator or heatsink, you want a tighter pressure profile; in a wider space, such as an exhaust situation or a hard drive intake fan, you want less turbulence so you can push the air away as fast as possible. These little tweaks and details add up to better performance, and Corsair is very excited about it. As a final touch, they feature changeable plastic color rings.
Their new cases are similarly exciting, and of course their RAM and peripherals are always attention-getting, but the thing I couldn’t stop talking about was their new SSDs.
If there was one thing I started realizing at this year’s Computex, it’s that I’ve been seeking out companies and products that set themselves apart from their peers… because there are so, so many things here that are essentially the same with different aesthetics. When I find things that are truly innovative, different, or detailed, I get excited.
So, as you may or may not be aware, there are basically three large players in the SSD controller market: SandForce, Marvell, and Indilinx. Indilinx is owned by OCZ and so they’re their own domain… which means the rest of the SSD manufacturers out there have to differentiate themselves by making firmware tweaks and other minor things (such as the ADATA firmware tweak that allows 0% OVP as mentioned above). It gets boring in the SSD world when every manufacturer is showing off benchmarks that all look exactly the same. I can’t tell you how many ~550mb/s ATTO scores I saw this week…
Corsair has partnered with a new name in the consumer controller biz: Link-a-media. They come from the enterprise and embedded space. Corsair is their exclusive first partner in the consumer space, and their controller will make its debut in the Corsair Neutron GTX series, soon to be available in 120, 240, and 480gb capacities.
The LAMD LM87800 controller puts Corsair in an interesting space: 90K IOPS. The focus here is throughput on random operations (much closer to real world performance than synthetic benchmarks like ATTO). Currently, OCZ’s Indilinx drives are pushing 90K IOPS, and it can’t help but be noticed that this puts the Neutron in direct competition with OCZ Vertex 4. It will be intriguing to see more from this controller.
After hanging out with the cool nerds at Corsair, we headed up a few floors and over to the Fractal Design suite.
FRACTAL DESIGN
Fractal Design is a Swedish company that advertises “Scandinavian Design” for their product line of cases and power supplies. The design language is definitely distinctive and Fractal Design’s heart is in the right place: Giving consumers new and different looks for their PC components, in a variety of useful form factors.
I feel like Fractal Design is maybe a year or so behind their competition in the features department, though. I didn’t see anything that really sets them apart other than aesthetics, and I’m not sure if that’s enough nowadays, especially with innovators like NZXT, BitFenix, Corsair, Lian Li, and In Win out there making some spectacular and original gear. The stuff I saw at Fractal Design was affordable and good looking, but they just seemed like more European-sleek versions of the many insane robotic-looking generic cases from countless unknown companies out on the show floor—almost as a counter-point and contrast to the Asian design aesthetic of lights and sharp edges.
Fractal Design strikes me as a company with a lot of potential; they need people to give them a chance, maybe purchase some of their cases and give good solid feedback about what they’d like to see in future revisions. I’ll start: I’d like to see better hard drive trays that don’t feel so flimsy. I’d also like to see better cable management options in their flagships. I’d like to see some more technological reasons to buy their power supplies, rather than ‘they look really nice and have excellent packaging’.
Their home theater PC cases were very nice, and have a Lian Li feel to them, but at a better price point. This might be their strongest product line, and their Node 304 might be their best case that I saw in the suite:
Party party party
After I left Fractal Design I made my way back to the hotel. Later that night we partied with Thermaltake. They had an amazing shindig at a popular club in downtown Taipei, across the street from the 101. There were girls, there was food and drinks, there were contests such as “treasure hunting” for things like a high heel shoe, a red thong, and so on. There were drunk men pole dancing. There was a man in Mona Lisa drag. There was a $15,000 cash giveaway. Jason Jacobs of TechwareLabs won that and an iPad 3 (that bastard). Some people have all the luck.
Despite being grumpy about not winning the cash, I had a phenomenal night cementing some new friendships with the guys from HardwareMX. I got a bit tipsy, did rounds of tequila shots with my Mexican friends, and met a Finnish fellow from MacToday who was shocked to find an American that spoke a bit of Finnish—a rare enough occurrence as it is, but much less so in Taiwan. It was one of the most multicultural experiences of my life, and I’ve had a lot of them.
It can’t be said enough: Thank you, thank you, thank you ECS for sponsoring this trip, on behalf of the Icrontic community who appreciates having a USA press rep on the Computex showfloor, and from me personally for allowing me to have this incredible cultural experience.
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