- Computex in Taipei, Taiwan is a very PC centric show.
There's lots of new hardware, new laptops,
new PC's for gamers, and for regular people alike.
And everything that's going inside of it.
There's a lot of exciting stuff to check out,
I'm Derek with Windows Central at Computex 2018,
and these are the best things that we saw.
(upbeat music)
We're gonna start things off on the gaming side,
with Asus' Republic of Gamers Line.
They introduced two new laptops, the Strix Scar Two,
and the Strix Hero Two.
These are sort of like mid tier gaming laptops.
They have the latest in the Intel Core i7,
eighth gen processors, GTX 1060 or 1070 GPU's,
and a 15 inch HD display.
These are very much Asus ROG laptops.
The style is very distinct,
but, they're still rather portable
for being full powered gaming laptops.
Those laptops aren't the only thing to come out of ROG,
they came out with their first phone.
It is very much a gamer centric phone,
it has a gamer centric design,
it very much looks like an ROG device,
but it still has lots of power behind it.
It has a high powered version
of the snap dragon 845 processor.
They picked the very best off of the line
so that we get maximum performance.
It's got eight gigabytes of RAM,
and it even comes with a little fan attachment
that you could put on it to make sure
that it never overheats.
The ROG phone even has a dock for your TV,
a fully wireless dock, a controller add on,
and even a dual display game pad.
It's unlike anything that we've seen before
in the phone space, and we're really looking forward
to being able to spend a little bit more time with it.
Speaking of gaming hardware, there's MSI,
they've been known for 10 years
for their gamer centric designs.
And they've come out with a new laptop
that at the surface level,
doesn't really look so much like a gaming PC.
It is the PS42, and it's the first laptop
in their prestige line.
It drops the very gamer centric black plastics
and RGB lights design for a more understated look
of thin and light, and silver aluminum.
Wouldn't look out of place at a coffee shop,
or at a business board room.
But that doesn't mean it's not a powerful laptop.
It sports core i7 processors and MX150 GPU,
and it's a plenty capable, portable gaming machine.
It just doesn't look like it on the outside.
Asus has some other laptops in store,
including the ZenBook Pro, and this is a high powered
device made primarily for creators.
It sports a core i9 processor, INVIDIA GTX 1050TIGPU,
up to 16 gigabytes of RAM and a terabyte
of SSD storage with four lanes of PCIE.
It is a fast, highly performant laptop,
and it's the sort of powerful machine
that people who are working in photoshop and premier,
and doing 3D rendering really look forward to.
It also has a 4K display with highly accurate colors
that sort of designers really need to make sure
that they're product is as good as it can be.
And it has something that's a little different,
it's what they call the screen pad.
They've replaced the track pad with a 5.5 inch
HD display, it still works as a track pad,
it has Microsoft precision drivers and all that.
But it could also have it's own little apps in it,
and also act as a second window and second display.
It's an interesting concept so far
the execution hasn't been great,
but it might be able to be improved.
Maybe something interesting will come out of that.
Now if you don't need something as powerful
and expensive as the ZenBook Pro, the new ZenBook S.
This is Asus' thin and light and powerful laptops.
It's thinner than a MacBook, and lighter than a Dell XPS13,
but it still has all the power and the latest chips
and processors that you want.
It also has a new Ergo Lift Hinge design,
where it actually opens up,
and the bottom of the laptop lifts up about 5 degrees,
for a little bit more of an ergonomic typing experience
and better ventilation.
And this wouldn't be Computex,
if we didn't talk about components.
We're talking about the hardware
and the stuff that goes inside of these PC's.
And we're right at the beginning of what's looking like
the first salvos of the processor war.
Intel came out and they announced a new Hexa Core processor,
that can bump up to five gigahertz in boost mode,
and then they came out and said,
"You know what? We're gonna do
"a 28 core processor later this year."
The very next day, AMD came out and said,
"28 cores? Pshh.
"We're doing 32 cores with the new Threadripper 2."
Both these processors will are due out later this year,
and it's very much looking like we've left
the gigahertz and megahertz wars behind,
and we're diving head first into the core wars.
Speaking of processors, Qualcomm is also getting
into the PC processors game.
We've seen a bit of this before with the Snapdragon 835,
and a couple of Windows devices,
but now they're coming out with the Snapdragon 850,
which is designed expressly for use in Windows PC's.
With the Snapdragon 850, Qualcomm is going after
Intel and AMD's bread and butter.
They're going after main stream users.
They're gonna be putting this
in devices in the $500-$800 range.
First armed chips that are really
capable of running Windows.
And that price range just so happens to be
kind of where you'll find, things like you know,
the Apple iPad.
It's not a coincidence at all.
This new Qualcomm chip has distinct advantages
over the competing Intel chips.
It runs cooler, so it means less heating.
It uses less power so you don't need much battery.
You can have a longer lasting device,
and thus you can make devices that are thinner and lighter,
and more responsive and flexible
to what consumer demands want.
It's also always connected and always on,
so your tablet or your PC will behave more like
a phone than a computer.
It's always getting data connected,
it has a fast LTE connection, versus,
you turn it on and it connects to a network,
and you wait for everything to download.
The Snapdragon 850 is due out later in 2018,
and we're really looking forward to spending some time
with these high-powered ARM PC's.
And while ARM processors are gonna open up
a whole new world of possibilities for portable computers,
the desktop isn't left out of things either.
Microsoft has unveiled a whole new
category of PC's for the office,
essentially for like, the meeting room and the boardroom.
they call them Windows Collaboration Displays.
And these are sort of inspired by Microsoft Surface Hub.
We're going to see the first ones from Sharp and Avocore.
And we don't know a whole lot about them right now,
we just know that Sharp's is gonna be
this big 70 inch high resolution display,
with a nice high resolution camera on it,
and it's gonna be able to do more than just having
a PC hooked up to a big screen in your office.
We'll be seeing more about that
later this year and heading into next year.
I wanna close out with my favorite thing from Computex.
And normally I don't spend a whole lot of time worrying
too much about these like future PC concepts,
because they're always the sort of thing that's just
several years off, and just dreaming about the future,
from what it's gonna be like.
But Asus kind of caught me off guard here.
They unveiled what they call, Project Precog,
which is, essentially just a dual screen laptop.
Essentially what they've done,
is they've taken out the keyboard deck and the track pad,
and replaced it with a second touch display.
It's the sort of thing that we've seen in concepts before,
but Asus says they're gonna come out with it
in the next 18 months, by the end of 2019.
And that is sort of that dream, that old courier style
computing device that we haven't seen before,
but now it's actually going to becoming a reality
in less than two years, and I'm really excited about that.
So that's a wrap from Computex 2018.
There's a lot of really exciting stuff
that we're looking forward to spending time with
in the months and the years to come.
But I want to know,
what are you looking forward to the most from all of this?
Leave a comment right here, and we'll see you next time.