Giant Robot Dinosaurs at the Citylink Mall Near the Nangang Exhibition Center


One day at the show, I left the Nangang Exhibition Center (the main site for most component, case and peripheral makers at the show), I left early because I was out of cash and craving coffee. So I hit up Google Maps for the closest HSBC bank, and walked a half mile or so in the typical Taiwan humidity toward my reward of cash and iced coffee. When I arrived at what turned out to be a shopping mall, I was unexpected greeted by large sculptures of yellow robot dinosaurs (and a few non-reptilian metal pals) that greeted me with mixed LCD-lit emotions. Taipei is full of cute characters that you weren’t expecting. But this group was probably my favorite of this year’s show.

Team Group’s T-Force Xtreem ARGB Memory


I'm really happy to hear about how much you hate RGB, but first I have to tell you about Team Group’s new addressable kit, which sports some tasteful lighting when it’s turned on, and looks great. But when it’s powered down (or the lights are just switched off), the memory sticks sport a clean, glossy black finish that just looks stunning. Performance is of course key, but this is hands-down the nicest-looking memory I’ve ever seen, and the company also showed off a matching Delta Max RGB SSD at the show which similarly looks great regardless of whether it’s lights are on. If the performance turns out to be reasonably good (and the price is reasonable), this might be the kit I go for when I upgrade my home PC form 16 to 32GB later this year.

Azio Iris Keyboard


Azio loves making stylish, vintage-inspired peripherals. During the show it debuted Azio Iris, a mechanical keyboard with Cherry MX switches and RGB backlighting (this prototype didn’t have it yet). The Azio Iris is a celebration of ’60s era cameras with its metal crown media control knob meant to twist and serve as a control center like an old camera’s lens. Also available in all black with white print, it’s anodized aluminum chassis is said to have an “aircraft-grade” top plate, plus a leather strip running along the backside. Each Azio Iris will come with Windows and Mac-friendly keycaps, Bluetooth and RF 2.4GHz dual-mode connection (note the built-in toggle). Number crunchers will appreciate the optional matching numpad.

Aorus AIC Gen4 8TB SSD


It’s impractical and unnecessary for almost everyone, but it was hard not to ogle at Gigabyte’s add-in card PCIe 4.0 drive enclosure. It pairs four of the company’s 2TB, Gen 4 M.2 SSDs in a graphics-card-like enclosure for 8TB of bootable storage that’s capable of sequential reads and writes in excess of 15 gigabytes a second. You’ll need a new AMD X570 motherboard to achieve those speeds. And you probably won’t notice just how fast it is unless you’re a content creator working with massive files. But we saw a demo of the drive run CrystalDiskMark so fast that there almost wasn’t enough room for the results to fit on the screen--without showing any decimal places.

I don’t want to want one, and I my credit card would certainly buckle under the weight of the price tag, whatever it turns out to be (Gigabyte hasn’t announced that yet). But I’d love to drop one of these into a new 12-core Ryzen 3000 build and see what it feels like to work and game on a system capable of moving all my bits around at an insane 15,000MB per second.

Noctua Fanless CPU Cooler


Passive cooling might not be new, but Noctua’s Fanless CPU Cooler prototype (expected to be a final product sometime in 2020) is a custom design that has us excited about silent performance. It’s fins are thicker and further apart than on most heatsinks and can run up to 120W in a case with good natural convection. If you were to add two case fans or a single fan to the cooler itself, it could reach 180W.

The design is slightly asymmetrical in an attempt to allow PCIe clearance. And the fan will come with the company’s new NT-H2 thermal compound.

On a demo system, the Fanless CPU cooler was over an Intel Core i9-9900K on an Asus Prime Z390-A, along with Corsair Vengeance DDR4-3200 FAM, a Palit GeForce GTX 2050 Ti, Samsung SSD and Nofan-P500a, all in a Jonsbo UMX4 case. When I saw it, it has been running Prime 95 for two hours and the CPU was running at 94 degrees Celsius (201.2 degrees Fahrenheit).

Representatives for Noctua told me it is aiming to get this passive cooler under $100 or €100.