In case you missed our 2014 San Diego International Comic-Con coverage over the course of the past week, and didn’t read our Comic-Con preview, Preview Night or Day 1 articles, we’ve got all of the images (and video) we’ve taken compiled together for you neatly in this article. If you’d like to know more about what happened, then we recommend you read those articles to see exactly what went down this past week. Yes, there were a lot of geeks, cosplayers, and comic fans, but Comic-Con once again went off mostly without a hitch.

We’ve also included some of our short videos from Comic-Con that might interest you. Overall, this year’s experience was much like the others before it, However it certainly felt like Comic-Con’s much awaited Saturday Hall H panels were fairly weak. If it weren’t for The Hobbit and Marvel’s panels on Saturday, Hall H would have not been worth the wait that most people had to endure (12 hours). Essentially, if you did not come 12 hours before the opening of Hall H (at 10am on Saturday) then you probably didn’t get into the first panel at 10 am. In fact, I managed to get into the first panel after waiting 12 hours outside, and still missed the Batman vs. Superman announcement from Warner Brothers.

This year’s Comic-Con will certainly be considered a more muted one than in previous years, but I believe that may just be because last year was so energetic and there were so many movies that they were promoting or announcing. Comic-Con will be a great show again, next year and hopefully we’ll have more to talk about since Avengers 2 Age of Ultron will release a few months ahead of Comic-Con. There is also a lot of potential for movies like the new King Kong film, the Hell Boy 3  movie (which is going to be very far away) as well as a possible Pacific Rim 2, which we have yet to get a firm date on. We’ll probably have another Assassin’s Creed off-site event and they’ll probably still be shaving people’s beards for free (like last year and this year). Until then, we recommend you check out the photos above, and the videos below.

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On day one of the 2014 San Diego International Comic-Con we got a chance to check out some of the off-site events going on around the show as well as walk some more of the show floor and take a look at what people are doing. On Day 1 there were a lot more people dressed up in costumes than during Preview Night, but there were also a lot more people in general. Day 1 was a pretty great success because we got a chance to play laser tag with people from Nerdist and 2K in the Borderlands the Pre-Sequel laser tag. They also had people from 2K games on hand showing demos of the game on PCs and there were prizes  (t-shirts) for those that participated in laser tag. It was a lot of fun and as we had stated earlier, the event is totally free and open to the public. No Comic-Con badges are required.

We also ran into some interesting characters throughout the day at the Comic-Con and were overall amused by some of their characters as many of them were in-character when they were dressed up for their cosplay. The really great thing about Comic-Con is that virtually anyone doing some sort of cosplay will stop for you if you ask politely and let you take a picture. Obviously, when there are huge groups this isn’t going to be as possible, but it is still a possibility. We also checked out Microsoft’s Xbox Lounge and were able to see a plethora of Xbox Titles either already out or about to come out on the Xbox One, this event is at the Hyatt hotel on the bay and is also open to any members of the public, and is very well air conditioned as Comic-Con this year is for some reason much hotter than years before.

There is also an obstacle course and gaming area that Assassin’s Creed is running that also features a high drop and a T-Shirt if you complete the course. There are also complimentary shavings like last year, but not a boat.

Also, the internet situation near Comic-Con and the convention center is horrific and the City of San Diego needs to work with AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile to build cellular towers inside the convention center as well as bring in COWs (Cell on Wheels) into the area to alleviate the network traffic because there are easily 150,000 people on any given day (think about all of the off-site events and people supporting them). Also, if you are having trouble connecting to the internet because the network is dying, we recommend you check out Nerd HQ or the Nerdist (above Nerd HQ) and connect to Padres Wifi and you should have a pretty fast and stable connection (thanks to Qualcomm and Verizon).

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Every year Comic-Con rolls around and every year they have a preview night where you can check out some of the booths that are already setup and even some of the off-site stuff that’s already set up. This year, it seemed like almost all of the booths onsite (in the conference hall) were pretty much up and running (and selling stuff or signing stuff). However, a lot of the off-site things were not quite ready yet and were in the process of being brought up. As such, this gallery won’t be as complete as some of our later ones, but we wanted to give you a short feel of what Comic-Con Preview Night is like.

Preview Night Starts at 6PM and technically runs until 10pm, even though I believe the conference floor closes at 9pm. There are a lot of screenings during Preview Night and most people that get access to Preview Night are people that bought 4 day passes with Preview Night. In fact, there were already people in line for Hall H (where all the big panels and sneak previews happen) for Thursday’s Hall H panels. Those panels are, Dreamworks, Paramount Pictures, The Giver, Batman 66 and Entertainment Weekly. I’m personally interested in Hall H on Saturday but will see what will happen that day.

The other thing about Preview Night is that it is supposed to be less crowded, but in recent years it feels not much less crowded than going on a regular day, which defeats the purpose of Preview Night. This year is a bit better than last year, which may be attributed to the fact that many booths did not allow people with professional badges buy anything. They will be able to tomorrow, but today was explicitly no professional badge sales, which may have been the reason for lower preview night floor attendance.

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We’ve been asking around, trying to figure out what will be going on on and off site this year and we’ve been sure to hit up all of the usual suspects in terms of gaming and hardware companies to see what they’ll be doing at Comic-Con this year. This year, Legendary will be having a pretty major focus on World of Warcraft, as they’ll be having a signing with the upcoming movie’s director, Duncan Jones. The signing will occur at 2pm on Saturday (likely immediately following their Hall H panel) and in order to get a poster and in line for the signing you need to stand in line at 11am at Blizzard’s booth (NOT Legendary’s) to get ‘tickets’. So, if you want to see the panel you won’t be able to get a signing from the director, which is kind of lame.

Legendary Booth
Booth Location: #3920

legendary booth SDCC

Legendary will also have a film panel in Hall H on Saturday, where I believe we’ll definitely see some serious World of Warcraft footage as well as some other films they’re working on. That will be on Saturday at 12:35. During the panel, Legendary will be live tweeting from Hall H at @Legendary.

Blizzard will also have a booth at Comic-Con, however their booth will mostly be for merchandise (Booth# 115) and the Director’s signing.

We’ve also caught wind of two laser tagging events that will be going on during Comic-Con, one is being put on by Nerdist Industries in partnership with 2K games (and Gearbox) and the other is by Comedy Central. The one being put on by Nerdist Industries (which we’ll be attending) is to promote the new game by 2K games and Gearbox, Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel. The event itself is open to the public and will be held at Petco Park from Thursday July 24th through Saturday July 26th at from 11am to 5pm. Priority will go to San Diego Comic Con (SDCC) badge holders, however everyone will be able to play as there will be two teams of 25 playing for a short period of time. There will also be special guests like Chris Hardwick, Gearbox president Randy Pitchford as well as prizes for Borderlands cosplayers and much much more.

The Comedy Central laser tag event (funny that there are two this year) will be to promote their new show Moonbeam City. This event will also be open to the public (and off-site) and will be located at The San Diego Wine & Culinary Center and will also include the Comedy Central GIF booth, Giveaways and more, running from Friday July 25th through Saturday July 26th from 11am to 8pm.

San Diego International Comic-Con

We also spoke with Intel to see what they’ll be doing at Comic-Con this year and they’re sponsoring a lot of various events and giveaways throughout the course of Comic-Con.

Intel is a sponsor of the 2014 Nerd HQ at San Diego Comic-Con. In the booth, Intel will feature tablets, 2-in-1s, PAIOs and the “Created by You and Intel” photo app. In addition to the photo app in the booth, Intel will be mobile with tablets and a never-been-done-before portable green screen to connect with additional Comic-Con fans.  Intel will also be prizing 1 Xidax gaming tower & peripherals ($1,523), 20 Core i7 Extreme processors ($1,000 each), and 4 Acer Iconia A1-830 tablets ($160 each). They are also providing 80+ Intel-based tablets, 2-in-1s, and PAIOs for Intel as well as for many of the exhibitors at Nerd HQ.

Intel is also the sponsor of the Nerd HQ and Operation Smiles “Smiles for Smiles” photo booth – featuring 2-in-1s for photo sharing. YouTube personality iJustine will be supporting onsite and via social with a photo-based Instagram contest.  Intel will also be providing 8 Core i7 Extreme processors to Makers for onsite co-marketing promotions and the same to Nerd HQ. They will also be running a retail offer with Newegg to give out coupons for $25 off Acer tablets.

Unfortunately, AMD and Nvidia will not have any presence this year at Comic-Con, so the amount of hardware that’ll be given out will likely be much less than last year. After all, a few years ago AMD gave out hundreds of APUs.

Microsoft will be attending again this year, as will Sony, however Microsoft will have both an Xbox booth and an Xbox lounge with tons of Surface Pro 3’s and Xbox Ones for relaxing and gaming.

It should be an interesting Comic-Con this year and we’ll do our best to report on what we find interesting and of course post pictures of all the cosplayers.

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Or… The Vendors Never Learn

It’s been a full 2 weeks now since the end of Computex, and the associated roaming around Greater China and certain (mostly Chinese speaking too) neighboring realms. This being at the very least fifteenth Computex for me, I didn’t bother much with press conferences and such, but checking the show floor to see what’s really going on, and then do a real check with selected vendors after the event is done with.

The Taiwanese, with diminishing focus on high end ‘added value’ PC stuff, moving towards mainstream consumer things with corresponding reduction in differentiation and ability to charge larger margins, in some cases increasingly relying on reference designs – tablets could be a repeat of the same story as graphics cards here. The Asus Transformer tablet range is still one of rare exceptions to at least aim there where higher margin Samsung or LG offerings are entrenched, for example.

Asus doesn’t seem to be so lucky with the ROG enthusiast board line, where Gigabyte has, according to more than one insider, claimed the quality prize and is now at the very least on an equal footing for the high end PC market board dominance race prior to the September Haswell-E next-gen Socket 2011 platform launch (the socket is NOT compatible with the current Socket 2011, just to state one more time).

So… The Big Four: Intel, Nvidia, Qualcomm and (still for now) AMD, all US vendors, still carry the innovation torch and, willingly or not, have to lead the OEMs into what to design and manufacture to a great extent. Ultrabooks and 2-in-1 convertibles were just an example, other stuff is just the same. Intel lost billions in the last financial year investing in an attempt to lead the mobile phone and tablet segments. Of course, they have the size & strength to ride over it without much impact thanks to over divisions, but a loss is still a loss, something very uncommon for Intel.

It’s funny… even despite all the Computex announcements, the best tablet announced at the time was not in Taipei, but in New York – Microsoft Surface 3 Pro (which we’re currently reviewing). It sports a proper Intel Core processor, proper 3:2 ratio display, proper (for tablet at least) keyboard cover, and proper OS, as much as one can call Windows 8.1 that – at least vs Android. Even though, Intel did have a Surface Pro 3 at their suite at Computex.

Then we come to the sea of mainland China vendors from Shenzhen, Dongguan and other cities, in their little booths at the old Taipei WTC hall. Plenty of them offering plenty of stuff, but it seems they aren’t willing to learn the key lesson from their Taiwan brethren: don’t you all want to avoid making the same cheap crap, trying to make a dollar a piece and then bleeding each other’s margins to death with endless fights for every customer? While only the SoC and IP license owners make any money from it all?

When I asked Intel if they have a role to play in this situation, one of their regional honchos in-charge, Leighton Phillips, Director Product Marketing, Intel Asia Pacific & Japan, explained that Intel is not the one restricting the components ecosystem for Intel-based tablets and such, but the choice is mostly on vendors themselves. After all, in his words, “Shenzhen city is like one really big company itself.” where certain “departments” decide to focus on repeating the low-cost stuff en masse and, hopefully, some bigger boys – or the daring ones with guts – decide to do unique things. Like it or not, after being in that city for years now on-and-off, I find it hard to disagree with this: many attempts to convince even the large groups there – even with ready buyers – to do something beyond the el cheapo fare, hit the risk-aversion wall. It’s a pity, as the Chinese government itself is more strategically focused on developing core technologies than, say, Taiwan.

After all, even outside the Intel world, a good example where a ‘me too’ strategy leads long term is one really big long time OEM in Hong Kong that survives – pitifully at that – basically selling their boards and cards at material cost. Yet, for years now, their very survival depends on their single principal vendors’ marketing money – which could be shut off anytime knowing that principal’s own survival issues.

Intel is, of course, investing a lot in Shenzhen: having (quite rightfully) selected it to be their next major hardware design center worldwide, after the USA and Taiwan. The rumors I hear from the insiders are for close to 700 engineering staff to be hired in Intel’s coming new space, likely in one of city’s many modern science & tech parks, within this year and early next – far more than the official 150 staff mentioned up to now. Whether this will encourage the local companies to do more daring product designs as Intel helps them offload the engineering risks to some extent, remains to be seen soon. The city really must not repeat the mistakes of Taipei, cornered now into doing low-margin ecosystem stuff for the real technology principals.

They aren’t the only ones – Nvidia is also strongly present here, even organizing organic farming fun for its Shenzhen staff, and Qualcomm is preparing their positions in the new hardware Mecca. After all, everything from smartphones to supercomputers are both designed and used here. Only AMD is missing, without even an office to call home here… tells you something, doesn’t it?

That also serves as a warning to Taipei, that – irrespective of the simple cheap stuff shown in their little booths – Shenzhen is on target to take more and more of Taiwan’s IT pie in the near future; you will be looking at reports from their IT fairs here in the next year and beyond as well. So, Taiwan must do what Japan did as well, and boldly go to the top end of technology and produce stuff for the top tier of the users, willing to pay stuff for it. A good reference are Japanese products shown at Singapore’s BroadcastAsia show last week – cameras and monitors for US$ 30K and above EACH, and workstations controlling them costing not much less. And, they sell well… why bother selling million Fiats when thousand Ferraris could make more?

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We sat down at Computex 2014 with Synaptics’ Godfrey Cheng and Scott Poole to talk about the company’s latest innovations, including their developments with their Forcepad. I was personally unaware that Synaptics’ first generation Forcepads actually had glass built into the touchpad to enable the Forcepad to work correctly and evenly distribute the pressure. However, the new generation of the Forcepad is capable of measuring the smallest amount of pressure at every point and no longer uses glass, making the touchpad more flexible, less breakable, and thinner than the previous generation.

We also got some hints that the company might be working on some interesting fingerprint tech that hasn’t yet been seen in products before, but will make using any computer with it much faster and more secure.

Now, getting to their Thintouch keyboard, as you can see in the image above, it looks like just any normal keyboard. But then once you close the switch, the keys disappear into the keyboard.

We sat down with Synaptics’ Godfrey Cheng so that he could explain this new keyboard technology to us and exactly what they believe it can do well. We’ve got a video of this technology in action so that you can see it for yourself, beyond just looking at the photos of the Thintouch keyboard we’ve taken.

This new Thintouch technology looks like yet another innovation from Synaptics that will enable even better user experiences, with the current target being 2-in-1 systems where a keyboard would be rendered useless in certain scenarios. Some current scenarios would be tablets with attached bluetooth keyboards or notebooks that transform into tablets where you don’t want the keys to get pressed or become a nuisance when being used in tablet mode. It will be interesting to see how manufacturers utilize this tech in their 2-in-1 devices in order to make their keyboards better, which they still are working on, as could be seen from Microsoft’s Surface Pro 3.

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As we had already covered most of what Gigabyte already had to announce from their new 9 series motherboards at the beginning of Computex, we were interested to see exactly what Gigabyte had to show us at their suite on the 36th floor of Taipei 101 (somewhere about 1/3 of the way up).

Taipei 101

After we got to their suite, we were greeted by Gigabyte’s Irene Huang, who graciously showed us around Gigabyte’s suite and introduced us to their full line of motherboards that they had announced earlier in the week. The first thing that caught our attention was Gigabyte’s walls of motherboards, with their new Ultra Durable line of boards to our right hand side. This Ultra Durable wall included both new 9 series boards as well as some older boards for AMD.

Gigabyte Ultra Durable Motherboards

As you can tell, Gigabyte has a multitude of Ultra Durable boards ranging from full ATX boards all the way down to Mini-ITX. After they showed us their Ultra Durable boards, Gigabyte explained to us about their Black Edition boards, which are their premium boards that are tested for 168 hours under extreme conditions under a constantly changing series of tests. These boards are designed to last longer because they’ve already been stress tested and they ultimately are awarded a 5 year warranty if they pass Gigabyte’s rigorous testing. According to company, the expectation is that these boards will only sell for about $20 USD more than the standard Ultra Durable or gaming boards that are made into Black Edition boards. And for that kind of price premium, I have a feeling many people are going to happily pay the price knowing that their boards are likely going to last forever. These may, however, end up getting snapped up by system integrators that know that these boards are far less likely to fail than any other motherboard on the market, making their jobs easier. Following that, we checked out Gigabyte’s Gaming line of motherboards, including a few interesting case mods that featured their latest Z97 boards, including a pretty attractive looking Z97 Mini-ITX board.

Gigabyte Gaming Motherboards

Gigabyte Z97 Mini-ITX Board

Gigabyte Hellboy Z97 Mod

They also had a 3 monitor car racing setup in their suite, which was powered by a modded system, pictured below.

Gigabyte Casemod

Meanwhile, all the time that we were going around Gigabyte’s suite their overclockers were busy using LN2 and prepping their boards for some world records. In fact, I believe they broke a record that day while at the suite, besting their previous record of 4.5 GHz DDR3 clock speed on Gigabyte’s Z97X-SOC motherboard. They were using Gigabyte’s Z97X-SOC and the Z97X-SOC Force boards to do some overclocking, both of which are some of Gigabyte’s newest overclocking motherboards. One not pictured, but used often during the week was the Z97X-SOC Force LN2 motherboard, which is a special board that only has two DIMM slots and no CPU mounting holes. This board is especially created for breaking memory clock speeds and CPU overclocking, which explains why Gigabyte continues to crush the memory clock speed world record. In fact, that speed was set at Kingston’s HOT (HyperX OC Takeover) event during Computex 2014 using Kingston’s DDR3 2933 MHz memory where Gigabyte’s team took first place.  

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At Computex 2014, Kingston had a lot of products to show attendees at their HyperX suite which also featured Kingston’s HOT (HyperX OC Takeover) where overclockers competed for a share of $10,000 in prize money. The rest of the floor was shared by Kingston’s various new products, some never seen before, and others updated since CES. The main stage was where Kingston would show off these products as well as host their League of Legends competition.

The HyperX Main Stage

We got a private tour of all of the products that Kingston currently has to offer, including the lowdown on how the company is rebranding their HyperX line of products to be more consistent and simple. In fact, some of their product names won’t change at all, while others will change just for the sake of consistency. Those lines will start with Fury at the baseline for HyperX, then be followed by Savage in the middle and Predator at the top. This will be reflected across all of Kingston’s HyperX memory and storage products and should make understanding the expected level of performance quite easy for consumers. They will do away with the Gensis line of HyperX products and will brand their SODIMM line of HyperX memory as Impact, unrelated to the other naming schemes.

The first product we were introduced to was actually an update to their recently announced gaming headset, the HyperX Cloud Pro Gaming headset which is the company’s update to the original, offering a white color in addition to black. Otherwise, nothing really drastic.

After that, we took a look at their new HyperX Fury 240GB SSD. This SSD is part of the company’s entry line of HyperX gaming SSDs and features a SandForce 2281 controller. The expected read/write speeds are about 500/500 MB/s and uses a standard SATA 6Gb/s connector and uses locked synchronous NAND. It will come in 120 and 240GB capacities.

Hyper X Fury 240 GB SSD

After that, we got to take a look at Kingston’s new MobileLite Wireless G2 (Gen 2) which is designed to vastly improve upon the original version. It now has a whopping 4640 mAh battery for extended battery life as well as a network port to allow you to use the device as a router. I have personally been hoping for such a device because my laptop doesn’t have a wired port on it and the MobileLite gives me the ability to get near to wired connection speeds without a wired port. It also has a USB port and memory card slot for sharing the media like the previous MobileLite did and charges via MicroUSB. The router functionality for 3G dongles, unfortunately is only available in Asia, but may eventually reach the US. Kingston’s demo showed the MobileLite Wireless G2 playing content off their also newly announced DataTraveler MicroDuo 3.0 USB onto the tablets next to it.

After that, we got a chance to see their new Phison-based M.2 SATA SSD which is a 22×80 mm SSD and is rated for a 555/520 sequential read/write performance. But they also had other benchmarks running so that we could see things like CrystalDiskMark and others as well.

After Kingston’s Phison-based M.2 SSD, we took a look at their HyperX Predator SSD, this drive is rated for speeds up to 1.8 GB/s sequential read. Obviously there are going to be a lot of companies out with these kinds of PCIe SSDs with SanForce SF-3000 series controllers fairly soon, so it will be important to evaluate who’s got the fastest drive and what kind of performance it really has. As you can see below, Kingston’s HyperX Predator PCIe SSD will be offered in capacities up to 2TB.

They also showed us their Marvell based M.2 SSD, which is their more high-end drive, capable of astonishing speeds of up to 1.3 GB/s. These drives will come in capacities up to 512GB and will sport 16nm NAND. Because of the PCIe controller from Marvell, this M.2 drive is capable of astonishing speeds, more than double the other M.2 drive that Kingston currently offers.

After seeing that drive in action, we got to check out Kingston’s new V310 SSD, which is a 960 GB SSD capable of delivering fairly high performance using a Phison 3108 controller that still delivers a pretty good level of performance with sequential reads over 500 MB/s and writes of 485 MB/s as seen in the CrystalDiskMark below.

Below, we will have a full gallery of all of the products that Kingston showed, including new and old products. Some of those products include their already announced, but never shown Fury RAM as well as their DDR4 desktop and server modules, still currently under development.

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This year at Computex 2014, AMD had a lot to show consumers including their new Kaveri mobile chip, FreeSync and the Toshiba 4K laptop running Battlefield 4 in 4K. Those three things were without a doubt AMD’s biggest announcements this week at Computex and we’ve got you covered with all the information about them, including videos and photos to simplify the explanation. We’ll be following up this article with another talking about Kaveri mobile, so most of the focus here will be on FreeSync and the Toshiba 4K laptop playing Battlefield 4.

At the beginning of Computex, AMD had a press conference where they talked about FreeSync and Kaveri mobile, and they had a demo of FreeSync running on one PC with the feature turned on and off. What they didn’t tell us was that at their booth on the Nangang convention center, they actually had FreeSync running side by side. So, when we found out about it we ran down to Nangang and got a video of the whole thing running side by side. Thanks to our Sony a6000 camera, we were able to easily capture the difference side by side and you can see the stuttering for yourself in the video.

Please remember that FreeSync is AMD’s similar implementation of what Nvidia did with G-Sync by combining the Adaptive Sync capabilities of eDP (embedded DisplayPort) in monitors. And by getting VESA to allow for it to translate over DisplayPort 1.2, creating Adaptive-Sync for DisplayPort and creating a DisplayPort 1.2a standard that would enable the translation of Adaptive-Sync from GPU to monitor. This full solution is dubbed by AMD as FreeSync since it should theoretically not cost consumers any more money as most features of FreeSync can be accomplished via firmware update. However, not many monitors use eDP so many consumers would end up having to get new monitors in order to be able to use FreeSync.

During AMD’s press conference they also had a Toshiba 4K laptop (the first 4K laptop in the world) running Battlefield 4. This laptop looked very unassuming in terms of physical attributes, but the 4K screen on the Toshiba laptop looked absolutely amazing. Sure, the frame rate was fairly low, but that means you could probably expect to play less intensive games in 4K on this Toshiba 4K laptop without a problem in the world.

We even included a video of this Toshiba 4K laptop so that you could see it for yourself since we had originally talked about it from its original announcement, but very few have had actually gotten their hands on it. The laptop itself runs very smoothly and is a great piece of kit, it will be interesting to see how much having a 4K panel affects battery life and how much more power the GPU consumes constantly displaying at 4K.

We’ll have more Computex coverage for you as we get to uploading more of our videos from the show.

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Kingston today held an overclocking competition with some of the world’s leading overclockers, their HOT (HyperX Overclocking Takeover). They offered a prize pool of $10,000 that would be distributed among the top 3 winners of 3 different benchmarks including Memory Clock speed, SuperPi 32M and Intel’s XTU. The teams were competing with eachother all day long and ultimately the majority of the competition was won by Team Gigabyte, who had utilized Kingston’s memory earlier in the week with their board to break the memory clock speed world record at 4.5 GHz.

Over the course of the day, the overclockers were competing to win the three different benchmarks. In the end, Team Gigabyte ended up hitting memory clock speeds of 2282.8 MHz which is an effective clock speed of 4.565 GHz on DDR3 memory that was originally clocked at 2.933 GHz. They ended up going home with $3,750 while TeamAU went home with $3,250 after getting 2nd place in all three benchmarks and finally Team China got $1,000 winning the SuperPi 32 benchmark.

HyperX OC Takeover Trophies

Kingston brought together all of these overclockers to show off how their HyperX memory is capable of some astonishing feats and will likely be able to go even higher than the current world record set at this event. 4.56 GHz is without a doubt an impressive memory clock speed and I have a feeling that there’s still a lot more to come from Gigabyte and Kingston in the coming days and weeks.

Kingston’s HyperX memory was well utilized by all of the teams present and will probably be used by a lot of the teams that competed today in order to try to get the best scores on the HWBot in the future as well to take their respective points. The winners today were certainly Team Gigabyte with their new Z97 boards as well as Kingston being able to get notoriety and yet another memory clock speed world record.

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My first day at Computex Taipei 2014 went much better than I thought. No, really. It turned out that when you’re a (blonde) girl wearing a Google Glass on an event such as Computex, your ego just rises up to the sky. You know that feeling when everyone kindly smiles at you, nodding their heads and you feel like a freaking genius nodding them back. Yup, you feel like one of the crowd.

To be honest, I hardly manage the difference between this and that graphic card or different motherboards. However, a 4K screen from the ‘ordinary’ one is easy to catch up. But it’s still not a reality. Will future 8K resolution turn computer displays and TV experience real just as looking through the window? I’m not much of a gamer though, but I saw numerous gadgets and really nicely arranged see-through acrylic chassis. And also, one of the cool guys named Shannon from the Thermaltake Group (Thermaltake, TteSPORTS and LUXA2 brands – manufacturing high-quality products for the global PC and mobile peripheral market), showed me that not everything is made for men. Actually, the last mentioned – LUXA2 – has some great accessories and pretty nice laptop purses if I may say. Not really kitschy, but really elegant and kind of a ladylike-ish. According to Shannon, they sell like hot cakes.

Just next to Thermaltake, there was a newcomer to the IT trade shows – US auto giant Ford hosted a press conference in regards to their upcoming hit, the 2015 Mustang. It was my first time to see a (live) Ford Mustang, being touted as “the smartest Mustang to date”, with voice controls and early warning collision systems. It can adjusts its speed automatically to keep a safe distance from vehicles in front and can boost brakes if it anticipates a collision and drivers can also set modes to normal, snow-wet, sport or track.

The interesting bit is that the carmaker is pushing to develop an app ecosystem, as everybody and their uncle are trying to get onboard and rival the innovative Tesla Motors and their Model S and X. Displays in those cars are humongous, though.

Getting back to the Mustang, it is a very nice car and allegedly – not so expensive (price in U.S. starts below $25,000). No wonder European customers grabbed the first available 500 units in 30 seconds during the UEFA Championship League Finals (being a football junkie myself, sorry – soccer for Americans). The car has Bluetooth 4.0, WiFi 802.11a/b/c/g/n and 4G LTE – that’s plenty of connectivity for me.

So, for the first day – it was really interesting. I got to talk with people who are actually very successful in industry. I also found out that the real geeks are actually very cool and smart people and I have nothing against being called myself one.  As Scarlet O’ Hara would say – tomorrow is another day. Hopefully even better than the first one.

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Intel has made it quite clear that they are dead set on reviving the PC market, especially from the high performance desktop point of view. They are showing their commitment to that vision today with the announcement of their new Devil’s Canyon refresh to the Haswell CPUs that they had launched last year. These new Devil’s Canyon CPUs are designed to accompany the company’s newly launched Z97 chipset, which adds a few minor features to the already existing Z87 chipset that Haswell had launched with. In fact, Gigabyte launched their full Z97 line of motherboards yesterday incorporating some of the new features of the Z97 chipset, including future compatibility with 5th Generation Core CPUs.

Intel 9 Series Chipset Overview

These new Devil’s Canyon CPUs are designed to slot in where the old Haswell CPUs sat in terms of price, while delivering a new level of performance on the CPU end. And yes, these new CPUs do have a 4w higher TDP at 88W vs. 84W. But in reality Devil’s Canyon is merely an overclocked version of the Core i7 4770K and Core i7 4670K. The only real differences are that the clock speeds are higher on the 4790K with the base clock being 4.0 GHz, Intel’s first chip that has all four cores running at 4 GHz stock speed. The boost clock is also 4.4 GHz versus the 4770K’s 3.9, but that’s only for a single CPU core in most cases.

Intel Devil’s Canyon

Devil’s Canyon Improvements

As you can see above, the primary changes that Intel has made with Devil’s Canyon are seen through their decision to add more resistors on the bottom of the GPU to help smooth out power delivery to the CPU. They also changed the thermal interface material (TIM) to their new Next-Generation Polmer Thermal Interface Material. They did this because a lot of overclockers complained about the TIM in Haswell because it simply didn’t overclock as well as many had expected it to. So, in fact, Devil’s Canyon is really a re-do more than anything really and Intel is sponsoring a ton of overclocking events here at Computex in order to see how high they can get overclockers to push these new CPUs.

Devil’s Canyon Pricing

In addition to the new Devil’s Canyon chips being supported on Z97, Intel has also made it clear that these new chips should work no problem with the previous Z87 chipset, a reversal of what we were originally told back at GDC earlier this year. Back then, we criticized Intel for forcing people into a new motherboard for no reason and it looks like they listened and most Z87 boards will probably support the Devil’s Canyon chips with a simple microcode update to the BIOS. While Devil’s Canyon isn’t necessarily much of a change for Intel in terms of architecture, it does show that they’re committed to improving and listening to consumers which is important. And if you build a Z97 system with a Devil’s Canyon chip, you can always upgrade to Broadwell when it comes out next year.

Now, last but not least, Intel is also announcing a Pentium Anniversary edition, which they also had pre-announced at GDC. This new processor is merely an unlocked higher clocked version of the Pentium processor designed to commemorate the processor’s 20 year anniversary and to give overclockers something to mess with and push with some overclocking to see how high they can get the CPU to go. We’ve got pricing for this new CPU below with the 1000 piece pricing being $72.

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Today at Computex 2014, Corsair released a variety of new products.

First up are the Cherry MX RGB Gaming Keyboards, the first mechanical keyboards to utilize the Cherry MX RGB switches that allow for different lighting. They’ll be available as the K70 RGB and K95 RGB.

Also launched is the M65 RGB mouse, a gaming mouse that provides three zone 16.8 million color backlighting.

The K95 RGB will have an MSRP of $189.99, the K70 RGB will be $169.99, and the M65 RGB will be $69.99.

Next up is Corsair’s new Hydro Series HG10 GPU cooling bracket. The cooling bracket will replace the reference cooler on a GPU and allow the user to hook up a Corsair Hydro Series liquid CPU cooler to the GPU. It will be available for $39.99, and will have several editions designed for specific graphics cards.

Also, Corsair showed off three new PC chassis.

The Carbide Series Air 240 is a Mini-ITX and Micro ATX chassis, which will ship in August at a list price of $89.99 to $99.99.

The Graphite Series 780T is a Full-Tower chassis, which will ship in September at a list price of $179.99 to $189.99.

The Graphite Series 380T is a Mini-ITX portable chassis, which will ship in August at a list price of $129.99.

In addition, Corsair announced the Voyager Air 2 Wireless Drive. The Voyager Air 2 wirelessly adds 1 TB of storage to Android, iOS, Windows, and Mac OS X devices. It utilizes the Voyager Air 2.0 software that adds new features such as support for simplified media browsing, cloud sync with Dropbox and Google Drive, and Airplay streaming for Apple TV. It can also be plugged into a USB 3.0 port for faster access. It will be available starting in June for $179.99.

Corsair also announced the Flash Voyager GTX USB 3.0 flash drive in 256 GB and 128 GB configurations. The Flash Voyager GTX uses SSD technologies with TRIM support for up to 450 MB/s reads and 350 MB/s writes. It will retail at $199.99 for the 256 GB version, and $119.99 for the 128 GB version.

Finally, Corsair launched the new HXi series PSU line. The HXi PSUs will be fully modular, they will have 80 PLUS Platinum efficiency, meaning they can achieve greater than 92% energy efficiency. The HXi PSUs will be available starting in August, and prices are as follows: HX750i 750 watt: $169.99, HX850i 850 watt: $189.99, and the HX1000i 1000 watt: $229.99.

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When I found out that I’m actually going to Computex Taipei 2014, my first thought was – well, nothing. The fact is that through all of my journalist years I’ve heard news bits about an IT conference that is held in Taiwan every year for the last 33 years. Somehow, I couldn’t imagine myself being actually there on that very spot. I’m aware that as for all of you BSN readers, I don’t have to explain what it’s all about. Somehow though, I still like to think that I’m not the only one who’s been IT ignorant so maybe this typically chick-lit text will find its readers.

Computex Taipei 2014 Intro Page

If you’d ask someone who knows me in person, they would probably call me a geek. A girl, but, still a geek. It is true though, that even I am a great final user of many gizmos and gadgets, I couldn’t call myself a geek. Nowadays, when a girl needs a huge amount of gadgets and related applications, it is practically impossible to stay a total idiot. Or lives under a rock.

In that way I’m pretty much trying to go along with the news in the IT industry. For me, the most important thing that a gadget should have is accuracy. I want my mobile/laptop/tablet (etc.) to act fast, be accurate, simple to use and – to look nice. It’s not the matter of benchmarks, which as we know – today can be owned by the manufacturers of the said gadgets.

Yes, I can understand some guys drooling over some really ugly (but still very cool, expensive, hip, mega extra wanted) notebook as it was some hot chick from AVN Expo. Still, for me, my gadgets have to be pretty, and has to match my other accessories and has to be noticed.

That is way I’m pretty happy because of attending of this years’ Computex. I you consider that it’s my peer, and that every year it gathers top ICT elite, different innovators and entrepreneurs from all of the world – I believe that there is a hope of finding some very cool and useful stuff. As organizers announced during their press conference, this Computex should be impressive for launching the new ‘SmarTech’ area featuring smart wearables, 3D printing and the rest of the smart technology at all levels of everyday life. Who knows, maybe 3D printing opens our ways to some new fashion era.

Teuta wearing Google Glass at the W Taipei Hotel.

All in all, through the next few days, I will be there having my Google Glasses on – assuring that nothing comes out of my way. And of course, I’ll be in my feminine way informing you on what have I learned and found out.

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Today, the day before Computex 2014 officially starts, Nvidia held their very first Gamer’s Day across the street from Taipei’s famous Taipei 101 at ATT 4 Fun’s 7th floor Show Box. The company had trucks driving around the area making the public and Computex attendees alike aware of the all-day festivities which started at 11 am and went til 7 pm.

While we didn’t get a chance to stay for the whole event, we did spend quite a bit of time walking around the venue and watching the festivities unfold, mostly in Mandarin. The focal point of the event was the professional League of Legends tournament being held on the main stage with commentators and $10,000 USD prize. There were also a series of amateur gamers playing League of Legends on separate machines. All of the gaming machines for the day with the exception of the three 4K gaming display were powered by MSI and their logo was plastered all over the event.

The Gamer’s Day also had a series of giveaways that would go on over the course of the day and included Nvidia-powered devices like a Gigabyte Tegra Note 7 as well as Nvidia SHIELDs. The last and ultimate giveaway for the day, at the end, was one GeForce GTX Titan Z. To do the math, this card is $3,000 USD and would come out to about 90,000 NTD (New Taiwanese Dollars), an even more daunting sounding price. According to Nvidia’s figures, they had around 1,500 people pre-register for the all day Gamer’s Day event. While we didn’t get any exact figures of how many people attended Nvidia’s Gamer’s Day, I can say with absolute certainty that their numbers were well into the high hundreds as people came and went over the course of the day.

Nvidia was also showing off a multitude of new G-Sync monitors from their partners including Acer’s 4K G-Sync monitor, ASUS’ 2560×1440 G-Sync monitor as well as G-Sync monitors from AOC and Phillips.

Nvidia chose to do a Gamer’s Day instead of having a booth on the show floor this year and it isn’t going to be the last time they do it either. Because at E3, Nvidia has already announced similar plans to forego a booth on the show floor and to build a Gamer’s Day-like experience outside of the convention center in order to make themselves more accessible to the public and local gamers. Nvidia is still going to have to pay the convention organizers at both events in order to do what they’re doing, but it alos

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As you would expect, Gigabyte has announced their new line of 9 series Intel chipset motherboards, with the primary focus being on their Z97 chipset motherboards. This time around, Gigabyte will have four different flavors of Z97 boards, which will support both 4th and 5th generation Intel Core processors. Gigabyte has rolled over a lot of the things from their Z87 line of motherboards, but also made some modifications and improvements to make the Z97 a worthwhile upgrade.

Gigabyte’s four different lines are their Gaming line, Ultra Durable line, Overclocking line and a new Black Edition line. The bulk of Gigabyte’s boards are going to be in their Ultra Durable line, which comes as a result of the fact that Gigabyte has decided to do away with the Ultra Durable numbering scheme, a good decision. In addition to that, Gigabyte is bringing more and more of their gaming and overclocking premium board features into their mainstream Ultra Durable line of boards. This is a welcome move because it simply improves the overall value of buying virtually any Gigabyte board. Some of those features include improved audio codecs and isolation as well as dual NICs and other gamer-focused innovations.

Gigabyte’s Z97 Gaming G1 Black Edition

However, in terms of excitement, Gigabyte’s most interesting announcement was the announcement of their Z97-OC LN2 board which is strictly an LN2 overclocking motherboard (or HE3). This board is especially interesting because of the way it was designed for optimal memory overclocking. This board recently broke the world record for the fastest memory, ever at 4.5 GHz, beating the previous record of 4.4 GHz on an ASUS board. It is a bit curious, though, that this new record isn’t being posted on HWBot, but maybe it will shortly… This Z97-OC LN2 board is special because it only has two memory slots and no mounting holes for the CPU. Because of these two major design decisions, this board is capable of overclocking memory higher than any board before it. And it was all done using Kingston memory, too.

The rest of Gigabyte’s line pretty much stays the same, gaining a few incremental upgrades here and there with the addition of M.2 connector and SATA Express support with the Z97 chipset. Obviously, not all boards will have these features but they will come and go through the product stack. The only new addition to Gigabyte’s line of boards are their Black Edition boards, which are Gigabyte’s premier quality boards designed and tested to last. All of Gigabyte’s Z97 Black Edition boards are designed for the ultimate durability, enduring 168 hours of grueling testing before being sent out to the customer accompanied by a 5 year warranty. Currently, Gigabyte only has three Black Edition boards, starting with a UD3 board, followed by a UD5 and finally completed with a G1 Gaming Z97 board which pretty much fills the Black Edition lineup with boards from all three different price and feature levels from Gigabyte.

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As Computex is getting ready to open its doors in and around Taipei, the capital of Taiwan – more products are leaking to the surface. Thanks to a Spanish e-tailer PCComponentes, we learned of one such product coming to the market comes from the States, in the form of Crucial’s Solid State Drive (SSD).

Crucial’s Retail box for the MX100 SSD

MX100 line of SSDs will mark the beginning of the end for memory chips produced using the 20nm process. While the 128GB drive will carry the 20nm MLC NAND memory chips, 256GB and 512GB models will feature brand new 16nm NAND flash from Micron. According to Micron,

“Our 16nm NAND technology is not only the leading Flash process, but it is also the most advanced processing node for any sampling semiconductor device. It improves on our award-winning planar cell design to create a highly compact storage solution.

Our advanced 16nm technology is also enabling a new 128Gb MLC device for applications that demand high-capacity storage in small form factors— including consumer SSDs, removable storage (USB drives and Flash cards), tablets, ultrathin devices, mobile handsets, and data center cloud storage.”

Micron’s 16nm MLC NAND Flash memory chip

Translated into regular English, a single 16nm chip features no less than 16GB of storage space. Should you wish to integrate this into an ultrabook of the latest type, you’ll be pleased to know that the drive in fact is a 7mm thick 2.5″ drive, featuring an 9mm adapter as well (if you buy a retail packaged unit).

The company stayed clear of LSI / Avago / Seagate / SandForce one more time, and utilizes Marvell’s 88SS9189 controller. This means the drive will connect using a convetional SATA-III (6Gbps), meaning the drive cannot achieve higher transfer speed than 600MB/s up and down. Naturally, the real stated numbers are far lower than that.

All three drives are capable of sequential reading of 550MB/s. Write speeds vary by drive (given the amount of memory chips used for the drive). 128GB SSD comes with the smallest number of NAND flash chips and it achieves barely 150MB/s write, while 256GB drive tops at 330MB/s. The big hitter is the 512GB model, with 500MB/s write speed.

These drives won’t be fastest in the class, but the 16nm process might help 256 and 512GB drives to achieve longer life span.

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Futuremark has today announced their new 3DMark DX11 benchmark called Sky Diver. Futuremark’s announcement of the new Sky Diver DX11 benchmark is clearly a pre-announcement ahead of Computex Taipei next week, which we’ll be covering for you from Taipei.  This makes Sky Diver the fourth benchmark as part of the 3DMark suite of benchmarks slotting in as the 2nd most strenuous test that 3DMark will offer cross-platform to PC and Mobile users ranging from smartphones all the way up to gaming desktops. Sure, it means that there’s yet another test to run, however this is a high-end test specifically designed to be able to run on gaming laptops and mid-range desktops and maybe even the ultra-highend tablet.

With the introduction of 3DMark Sky Diver, here’s how Futuremark’s 3DMark tests break down for different classes of hardware top to bottom (DX11 feature level 11 all the way down to DX11 feature level 9).

3DMark Tests:

Fire Strike, for high performance gaming PCs (DirectX 11, feature level 11)

Sky Diver, for gaming laptops and mid-range PCs (DirectX 11, feature level 11)
Cloud Gate, for notebooks and typical home PCs (DirectX 11 feature level 10)

Ice Storm, for tablets and entry level PCs (DirectX 11 feature level 9)

Futuremark will also be showing Sky Diver at Computex at multiple companies’ booths including ASUS, MSI, GIGABYTE, Galaxy, Inno3D, and G-Skill from  June 3 through June 7th. This will likely become the standard GPU benchmark for laptops where Firestrike is too strenuous and Cloudgate isn’t stressful enough. Anyone that has ever run both benchmarks would know that there is a huge gap between the two different benchmarks in terms of stress on the GPU and system as a whole, so it makes total sense that they would come out with it. We will be sure to include this test in our future benchmarks and to add it into our GPU benchmarks for middle to low end GPUs where Firestrike is may not be very useful.

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