Computex 2018 – The Debreif & Highlights

The shock of the Show – The best-kept secrets of Computex

Sometimes a product can land and hit the PC community completely off-guard, so much so that some staff within the same company didn’t even know that it was coming. 

At the start of Computex ASUS revealed their ROG Thor Power Supply and their Ryujin and Ryuo series of AIO liquid coolers, products which were such a closely guarded secret that even ASUS’ UK PR team didn’t know about them until their official debut. As you can imagine, this made sourcing accurate information for these units difficult initially, at least until everyone at ASUS was given the run-down on the matter. 

While ASUS’ ROG Phone has been an open secret for quite some time, with rumours of such a device stemming back to 2017, nothing was known about ASUS’ new AIOs and PSUs until shortly before their official debut during the ROG Computex livestream. We certainly didn’t expect ASUS to enter the AIO liquid cooling market, especially with a unique design like the Ryujin. 

While both the Ryujin and Ryuo are both using Asetek liquid cooling technology, ASUS has made sure that their offerings can deliver something that nobody else in the AIO market can provide, customizability in the form of an OLED screen. This OLED screen can be used to display a Republic of Gamers logo, though it can also be used to display a custom image or animation. 

ROG’s Ryujin is also able to offer the user some additional airflow that is directed at the VRMs and other motherboard components, though we remain to be convinced whether or not ASUS can provide enough airflow to deliver a notable thermal impact while staying quiet under load. This factor is something that we will look into if ASUS sends us a review sample of their new AIO liquid coolers.    

 

Moving onto ASUS’ new ROG Thor Platinum series of power supplies, it is clear that ASUS wants to hit this new market with a bang, offering users external RGB lighting, an OLED wattage monitoring screen and an aesthetic attention to detail that can be seen both inside and outside of the unit.

ASUS’ Thor Platinum power supply will ship with 1200W of available power and 80 Platinum-grade efficiency, offering users more than enough thunder for any modern gaming setup, even those that make use of multiple graphics cards. The unit will also be cooled using an IP5X-certified 135mm wing blade fan and a 0dB cooling mode.

Each of the RGB LEDs on this unit is individually addressable using ASUS’ Aura app, allowing system lighting to be adjusted to suit the user’s preferences. Sadly, ASUS’ side mounted OLED screen cannot be adjusted to offer anything aside from a PSU power readout, making it less customizable than ASUS’ new ROG Ryujin and Ryuo AIO liquid cooler.

As you can see in the image below, we can see that ASUS has taken the cooling of their Thor series power supply seriously, with ASUS claiming that ROG Thor runs cooler than competing 1200W units, helping ASUS achieve increase longevity for their components. This attention to detail is one of the reasons why ASUS can offer a full 10-year warranty with their first ever high-end power supply.

While some people will complaint that ASUS started off with their high-end 1200W unit, it seems more than likley that ASUS has lower wattage units in the works. Beyond that, with thee intorduction if high-end platforms like X299 and X399 and 16-core processors or larger, it seems incresingly likely that these high-wattage units will become more common in the future. Intel and AMD plan to release 28-core and 32-core CPUs later this year respectively; both are which are likely to consume a lot of power.