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PC Hardware Trends for 2018: "Ecosystems," Better LEDs & VRMs

2018-06-15
everyone so now we're doing our annual trends from Computex video for the PC hardware industry we did one last year for combi Tex 2017 and for that one we primarily talked about RGB LEDs and tempered glass not really a surprise looking back in the air so I'd like to say we called it but it was pretty obvious this year RGB LEDs and tempered glass persist but they are a bit more tasteful it's less glue it on everything and more figure out how to glue it onto something in a way that actually makes sense so that's one of the things we'll be talking about we have a couple of other trends to go over in this video though before that this video is brought to you by thermal takes view 37 case the vo 37 focuses on highlighting custom PC builds with its full panoramic window and tinted front acrylic and our thermal testing the view 37 performed reasonably well when considering its looks focused build which is partly thanks to the airflow design and the removal of a bottom power supply shroud for a balance of looks and performance check the link in the description below for the view 37 so for the first one as noted more tasteful RGB LED implementation from the show and by this mostly what we've observed is that a lot of the LEDs this year are going the form of digital LEDs on the components so on things like motherboard stuff like that you'll get the full spectrum LED as opposed to just single diodes all over them so now placing LEDs on just everything anymore they are actually diffusing them more the manufacturers that is so the RGB LED implementation I guess it's a bit less offensive than last year but it's still present glass still on pretty much everything courser was sort of big last year with doing just literally every single side of the case putting glass on it except for the back and we haven't seen quite as much of that this year so I guess that's a good thing that means that we're refining the trend rather than just leaving it as a pure fad like it was last year we're just having it was enough to get interest now it actually has to be refined to get interest it's not good enough on its own anymore next big one is the ecosystems that's the the word the manufacturers like to use ecosystem where basically they want to make every single component in your PC is now so you people like gigabyte making memory power supplies coolers cases literally every component that goes in there and all the vendors are basically doing peripherals as well including asus in a big way she's trying to do cases and with these big motherboard makers a lot of the time they seem to think that just existing is enough for them to get sales because they do so well and operate on such low margin with their main their core business that making something like a case seems easy to them and turns out you look at a shoe sees cases they're not that great actually in the same is true for gigabyte so these companies have a lot to learn from these smaller manufacturers who make cases as a primary product category but they are trying to all go the route of basically building what they call an ecosystem a big stupid buzzword right now that basically means they want to sell every single component that you put in a computer so not something we're big fans of really what we'd rather see is companies focusing on what they do kind of okay now or well and then improve on it rather than trying to do everything of questionable quality for all of those things so another example of these peripheral manufacturing operations that are going on now with ACS gigabyte so forth they able to do peripherals at a much much higher margin than they're used to because for asus gigabyte EVGA all of them GPU manufacturing is less than 10% margin you're talking four to eight percent in the worst cases for those people so to make a keyboard where they can suddenly step down in there their prices by 50 percent and still make margin that shows why they're doing this course is a great example they routinely cut their prices by something like 50 percent towards holidays and that's because they can still make money on it with a 50 percent discount the next one is air flow so air flow seems to be back in a bigger way and it's under more consideration this year than last year which is a good thing because last year was so dominated by glass and RGB LEDs that we lost sight of having decent air flow and this isn't some crusade to have air flow in every single case ever it's just it needs to be enough that you actually still have some performance and here's the other thing if you have decent air flow and the focus of the case is silence by not restricting the intake you can cut down the RPM of the fans and reduce noise so the focus is silence you still get that by having an open front case it's just through a different means than closing it off and there's a balance to be sure companies like be quiet have more or less figured it out but other companies like BitFenix are still trying to figure it out so airflow tis hopefully looking like a bit more of a trend this year than last year in that the companies I think have have had their fun with glass and now they're cutting it back and trying to figure out how to mix it to in a more actually functional fashion so that's great to see the SL 600 mm is a good example H 500 enter max is looking at doing mash or glass options on their cases so it's BitFenix and it looks like overall an improvement in that front the next one last two actually big prm's we're pretty trendy at this show so for AMD motherboards especially important and thread Ripper everyone's preparing for higher current draw chip so threader for two especially and on the Intel side they're preparing for the 8 core chips on Z 390 so with those in mind bigger VRMs are a lot of 3555 a lot of 35:56 MOSFETs use there's our IR parts so you see a lot of 60 and 50 amp and 40 amp power stages being used on really big VRMs and in preparation for the higher power draw chips that's a good thing that makes a lot of sense the motherboard vendors seem to actually be getting ahead of the CPU vendors for once and that's actually pretty rare so that's good thing to see as well and then finally shiny and glossy Ram looks like it might be a trend this is one we're taking a shot in the dark because Galax had it and g.skill had it and between those two companies making fake gold-plated RAM or silver-plated Ram quotes around that it's possible that we could see other vendors following suit because if LEDs aren't doing it from people enough anymore then I guess gloss and fake gold plating is the way to go next so that seems to be one of the trends we picked up on at the show that's all of them for now for this year if there were any trends you notice while watching our coverage leave them in the comment section below because we saw a lot of stuff so you might be able to connect the dots a bit better being that you had all of our videos to go through as always subscribe for more go back through the channel catch Computex coverage you've missed any of it YouTube pi didn't send it all of it to your sub boxes patreon.com/scishow cameras exits outside directly and stored on cameras nexus net pick one of our mod mats which are on backorder and on the way for the next round and as always I'll see you all next time
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