Major PC Hardware Developments at Computex 2023: Enclosures, Motherboards, Video Cards, Processors and Internal Memory

It is practically impossible to keep up with the large amount of new hardware that will be announced during Computex 2023. That’s why we’re publishing an overview of all the major PC hardware developments that were presented at the Taipei show.

Enclosures

During Computex 2023, the focus of manufacturers was besides introducing the expected new ‘conventional’ enclosures, often on compact designs. Several extra compact cabinets were unveiled for both on the desk and in the truck. Tweakers noted that flatpacks are emerging, housings that are transported as a kind of kit and must be assembled by the user. That makes a difference in size and therefore in transport costs, which could even result in a somewhat cheaper PC cabinet. InWin also presented the MODFree, a modular cabinet that consists of different sizes of ‘cages’ and can be adjusted by the user.

In addition, some other remarkable concepts were shown during the hardware fair to make housings as compact as possible. Cooler Master kept it relatively simple and, for example, went for a vertical design with the NCore 100 Max. Fractal Design went a step further and equipped the mini-ITX Terra case with a sliding motherboard plate, so that the user can adjust the ratio of the space for the CPU cooler and the space for the graphics card.

Related:

Motherboards

ASUS and Gigabyte showed off new versions of their “cableless” PCs at the show, made possible by a modified motherboard with power connectors and other connectors on the back of the board. In this way, common cables can be connected to the motherboard from the back. This also requires a modified video card that is supplied with power via an extra PCIe connection.

As far as other major motherboard developments are concerned, the fair was fairly quiet during the show, although the single announcement shows that most manufacturers are starting to equip their new boards with Wi-Fi 7 and PCIe 5.0.

Related:

Video cards and processors

It was also relatively quiet during Computex 2023 when it comes to new video cards and processors. Some brands came up with their own variants of recent GeForce RTX 40 series video cards, in some cases equipped with water coolers or announced in combination with separate AIO water coolers.

Major consumer hardware news from GPU giant Nvidia failed to materialize; the American company mainly focused on AI applications during the fair. The already released H100 server chip was also the focus of the Computex keynote. Roughly two weeks before Computex 2023, the brand announced its latest GPU, the RTX 4060 Ti.

Related:

Internal memory

In the field of working memory, the fair in Taiwan was mainly dominated by extremely high speeds of modules with the DDR5 standard. For example, Corsair announced the Dominator Titanium DDR5 modules that can achieve a speed of 8000 megatransfers per second. G.Skill also pushed the limits in several demos with DDR5-8800 memory sticks with cas latencies of 40-52-52-140. Very lavish configurations were used for this, including a system with 384GB of ram and the stated speed of 8800MT/s, specifications that will not be applicable to the average consumer for the time being.

Related:

Other developments

Of course, Computex 2023 could not pass without a major emphasis on AI applications. As mentioned, Nvidia has a strong focus on generative AI, for example using “digital twins” of physical objects. In addition, the American company presented the new ACE for Games technology, a generative AI language model for games that allows gamers to talk to game characters through a microphone.

Furthermore, a few smaller firsts were presented during Computex 2023. ASMedia, for example, showed a solution for the lack of a USB4 connection on most cheaper motherboards. Currently, only Intel offers a common USB4 controller to enable USB-C and Thunderbolt compatible data transfer; this controller is quite expensive and therefore often not present on cheaper motherboards. The ASMedia ASM2464PD allows users to add a USB4 module with multiple USB-C and DisplayPort connections to an existing system. This USB4 module requires a PCIe 4.0 x4 port and supports 40GB/s data transfer. It is also possible to charge devices with a maximum power of 100W.

Finally, Minisforum presented its smallest mini PC to date and Enermax came up with the first power supply that supports both the ATX 3.0 and ATX12VO standards.

Related: