Myself and Gamer packed our adapted to the Taipei hot weather clothing and the usual stuff to attend some of the OC gatherings at the different HQ's. Don't expect this article to be a round up of all of the booth tours, because it will not live up to your expectations. Some of the new interesting stuff that caught our eyes will be shown in this article, nothings less, but also nothing more.

Since Gamer never ever flew, it would be a rough maiden flight for him. A total of 13 hours of flight time was ahead of him. On top of that, he was not allowed to smoke at all during the air time, so he made up for it big time while awaiting the next flight on the airport. First a small KLM Cityhopper inbound Amsterdam, where we swapped it for something slightly bigger, a Boeing 747-400 to fly us inbound Hong Kong airport. From there a short flight inbound Taipei, Taiwan.

Massman arranged via the HWBOT forums a cosy apartment for a few OCers to hang out. After an insane taxi ride we arrived at our super luxurious loft. Diving straight into the action with SOF from Awardfabrik and Danish OCers Zolio aka Martin Paulsen.

Our room looks so much better then Martin's little green prison cell. Never mind the beers on the table, they were left behind by the previous inhabitants, dirty sods, nevertheless we drank them all.

First stop on Tuesday, still feeling so so after the Gigabyte Part at the Tavern on the night before, was to meet up with some of CORSAIR's new lineup. CORSAIR opted to rent a suite at the magnificent Grand Hyatt hotel, this to create a more intimate atmosphere.

The brand new Vengeance Pro RAM series are optimised for Intel's brand new Haswell platform, ranging from 1600 to 2933MHz with a maximum capacity of 64GB. At the moment not even the high end kits will be manufactured as Dominator Platinum kit. Probably this to reduce costs thus be able to sell the kits at a more competitive price.

On display a limited edition highly binned 8GB 3200C11 kit, pushing the limits of the i7-4770K CPU IMC, as it required close to subzero temps to maintain stability. Jake Crimmins aka Cpt Planet, CORSAIR's in house IC binning man and OCer, labelled named them after the infamous Danish OCer Marc Beier, as you can see in the SPD. Extremely lucky are the happy few that get send one of these rare kits.

CORSAIR also had an interesting case design with the Carbide Air 540R, recalling one of the dual case mods I did once. Using one chassis for the hardware and cooling and the other case for power supply and storage. A nice concept that will be available soon.

New was also the Carbide 330R, sporting 140mm fans and an optimised direct air flow design. Since the acquirement of the renown Razor company you will see more and more refined products appear in the peripheral lineup of CORSAIR.

No new additions to the Hydro All in One Liquid cooling solutions sadly. Time to head to the Nangang hall to visit some more booths.

The Computex tradeshow is divided over a few different halls, though for desktop components the Nangang Hall will be the place to visit. First stop was the G.SKILL booth as this would be the most interesting spot for the enthousiast crowd to hang out at. Every day world famous overclockers would attempt to break a WR. But first some shots of the displayed hardware. Weirdly enough no new heatspreader design for the optimised Haswell RAM kits, however remaining loyal to the TridentX brand. A whopping 32GB 3000C12MHz kit was on display, with a rumoured 4K price tag.

Two brand new 7.1 surround gaming headsets will be added to the G.SKILL gamma, the Ripjaws D71 and R71. The shown models are not the finalised products, availability is for the 3rd quarter of this year.

ASUS' ROG booth had the most surprises for us. Having attended the technical Z87 seminar we finally could see the new ROG FORMULA board. At first glance a blend of ROG design with TUF components:

Secondly the brand new Maximus VI IMPACT, a ROG Mini-ITX board with big potential as it broke the RAM frequency world record at the G.SKILL booth when the ASUS boys were overclocking.

The ROG Poseidon GPU cooler seems to pack some serious potential. Being a mixed air/watercooling heatsink it can either be ran as an air cooler, water cooled or as a combined setup. Even tough we were pretty sure the pump unit was NOT properly working on the display model, as the rear of the PCB was scorching hot versus the air cooled setup,  the card survived the torture of rendering the Metro Daylight game on a triple screen setup during the entire Computex.

Together with Overclocking legend Nick Shih ASRock has been able to win the hearts of many enthousisasts. The Z77 OC Formula board was a great performer and we expect nothing less of the Z87 successors. The Z87M Formula in fact holds the current WR for memory clock at a  blistering speed of 2145.2MHz

On display was also the conformal coating from ASRock. Nick told us the extra cost to treat the mainboards with the coating was about 10 dollars per piece. Always nice to have this feature onboard when going subzero.

Overclocking guests at the ASRock booth were John Lam from HKEPC and Allen aka Splave from the USA. We found them binning PSC ICs at 2400C7 at 1.65VDimm. This was all possible via the Avexir crew, which allowed the top guys to select and test their own ICs. A special handpicked DIMM set would be made wrapped in a special custom heatspreader.

Having specific theme matching Heatspreaders for each motherboard brand is a real good marketing strategy.

Our next stop was at BITFENIX. Again a new lineup dedicated to mATX motherboards. The midi tower Ronin case, equipped with a windows sports a serious nicely crafted design. BITFENIX also launches a new lineup of mainstream power supplies, the Fury series, Available soon in a 550-650 and 750W version.

Cooler giant Noctua also refined some of their cooler designs. Especially the low profile coolers received a compatibility treatment for hassle free installation on the latest generation motherboards. New fan designs, for lower power consumption, higher static air pressure all at a  lower vibration level then the current models.

One of the highlights at the Noctua booth was a novel heatsink base plate with a diamond-copper composite insert. Made from pure diamond and copper powder by state-of-the-art hot pressing technology, this material offers a thermal conductivity of about 500W/mK, which is 25% higher than pure copper.The model shown at the booth was a first test sample, results will be revealed after upcoming tests.

COOLER MASTER had some new AIO prototypes ready. How about a 120mm Seidon with double radiator capacity? How this will increase cooling performance as the radiator surface is in fact doubled, will depend a lot on the included fan(s). Similar alike CORSAIR's HYDRO 90 and 110 models, COOLERMASTER will walk the 140mm Fan path with the NEPTON 140/280 versions. New air coolers were also shown but seemed to bulky at first glance.

MSI showed their GTX770 Lightning card, the high end GTX780 model was obscurely hidden. Apparently the new gaming motherboard and graphic card series allow the company to regain some lost market share. The Z87 MPOWER, XPOWER and XPOWER MAX were the main attractions at the MSI booth. Really nice looking boards, the heatsink alone leaving the impression these boards are build for end user abuse.

The gaming notebooks will updated with the new Intel Haswell mobile CPUs as enhanced graphical power by the latest mobile GPUs, alike the GTX780M from nVIDIA. MSI is always in for some teasing as they showed a pretty funny mocking video about the fan technology of another A-brand.

ENERMAX is back with some improvements over the previous ELC AIO cooling units, the Aquachanger and Liqtech models sport a sleeker pump and improved fin design of the copper base plate. If they make it to the stores depends on the outcome of the patent debate with the Asetek company. The ENERMAX T40 air cooler might become available in user defined colours.

For laptop users that want a cooler running notebook together with improved sound quality, then the new AeroODIO seems a perfect fit. Two speakers, connnected to the integrated soundchip, the Dreambass ( similar to the external USB version ) will open a new dimension to the audio output of your notebook.

Enermax also updated their Thriathlor models with a cheaper ECO lineup, however still 80+ versions, These will be retailing at 10-20$ less then the current models. The premium Gold versions also receive a serious price drop treatment of around 20-30$, to remain more competitive wih the other brands. Fanless PSUs should become available soon around August in 400-650W models.

Two new enclosures also caught our eye. The Oenus and Oenus GT, both optimised for watercooling. The GT version supporting large XL-ATX motherboards. Both will be available soon.

The guys at the FUNC booth had a few nice novelties in their peripheral lineup. The 460 keyboard seems build to withstand some serious pounding. The new HS260 headset, optimised also for long gaming sessions even has pluggable microphone and audio jacks. No more torn cables possible.

Enclosure designer FRACTAL also had some nice cases on display. The ARC midi R2 remains an impressive compatible case, being able to house a 360mm and a 240mm radiator, this only when using SSDs as storage devices. This model , already introduced early this year, started of a trend as we saw more and more mATX only enclosures at COMPUTEX.

The ARC XL is able to house the same watercooling equipment, but has room to fit even the biggest monstrous XL-ATX mainboards. GPU compatibility is ensured up to 480mm. The exact pricing was unknown, availability foreseen for the 3rd quarter of this year.

You need to travel over 10000KM to encounter a Belgian enterprise specialised in nano coating. Europlasma has been treating several consumer electronics, textures with these ultra thin layers to make them 100% waterproof. Apparently deals with Logitech are in the making to nano coat some of their peripherals. On display was a soaking wet loudspeaker and a smartphone that regularly took a dive. Both coated devices remained in perfect working order.

That the Taiwanese have weird naming policies is no secret, but calling your firm PIPO or even Strontium makes me eyebrows frown.

Memory manufacturer GeIL had a brand new lineup ready for Haswell, named EVO Potenza. Several heatspreader colours were present at the booth, however the final versions has not been decided upon. Max speed is at 3000MHz Cas 12.

Their peripheral section, called EpicGear got a brand new keyboard ready for the avid gamer, the Dezimator. Featuring fully customizable keys, a key override function to enable more keys to be pressed at once and full multimedia control. The Blade mouse is a cheaper variant of the Meduza gaming mouse.

OCZ  unveiled the new Fatal1ty Gaming Series power supplies (PSUs) in updated 550W and 750W models, all fully compatible with the Intel's Haswell platform.  Both models feature a single +12V rail and a 80-Plus Bronze rating.  Jonathan Wendell is still an ace at gaming, as he demonstrated his skills at the club Spark, thrashing Relic in a best out of five Painkiller one versus one game.

The new high end Silencer MK III series peaking at 1200W will be manufactured by PC Power and Cooling. A quality brand as these power supplies are covered by a 7 year warranty !

Storage wise the Vector PCIe SSD will be ready for launch in Q3 of this year. For the normal SSDs, the transition to 20mm nand was already completed with the Vertex 450 series, it will be a logical follow up that the high end Vector SSDs will get the same treatment. Thanks Joost for showing us around and inviting us to the Club Spark.

Gigabyte invite us for a meet and great to show us their new products range at the splendid Taipei 101 building. Afterwards a nice lunch with some local sushi food and in the afternoon we were heading off to the Nanping Gigabyte factory.

Both the OC boards, the Z87X-OC and the Z87X-OC Force will be thoroughly tested at the Gigabyte OC lab the next few days. The ore mainstream targeted boards alike the Z87-UD5h are fully packed with features to satisfy even the die hard crowd. The gaming series main novelty is an upgradable AMP chip to adjust the sound to the specific needs of the end user.

Gamer the master of chop sticks ! After a delicious lunch we were off to the Gigabyte Factory to get some behind the scenes view how it's made.

Before we could enter we had to pass an air chamber. The Newegg film crew was also present. For a good insight what exactly happens you can check out this great video from Overclocking TV. Really interesting to see that many of the components are still manually inserted.

All boards are checked for proper working order, via a fast fully automated bench suite.

Each day at Computex, the biggest stars of the overclocking scene would attempt to break a World Record. Here are some shots of the ongoing action, too bad we missed Kingpin and his Quad eVGA Titan setup.

4 New WRs were set at the G.SKILL booth, quite impressive as benching with an audience, at regular intervals puts a lot of strain on the overclockers.

9.78 secs Pifast set by Fredyama, Shamino and Young Pro on ASUS day

20089 3DMARK Fire Strike Extreme set by Kingpin on eVGA day with 4 x Titans on LN2

31125 3DMARK Fire Strike set by Kingpin on eVGA day with 4 x Titans on LN2

70106 3DMARK05 set by Hicookie, Dinos22 and Young Pro on Gigabyte day with 2 x Ttans on air

We found a Belgian Beer Garden, with real brewskis !!!!

During the last weekend we were invited at the Gigabyte OC lab. An opportunity we could not resist, who doesn't want to bench amongst OC legends alike Hicookie, Dinos and YoungPro ?

Most of started to bench on the new Haswell platform by using  the Gigabyte Z87X-OC and OC Force boards. Alva was tempted by the new AMD Richland A10 6800K CPUs and played with the integrated HD8670 graphics on the FM2 board. Me and gamer found a pretty decent i7-4770K ES CPU that was pretty stable at 6400MHz. After some further testing we decided that Roman could have a go at it together with his zombified Titan card.

We bought 4 retails that day and all of them were pretty craptastic. All are awaiting the Costa Rica production, with high hopes for improvement. So far only a few retail CPUs have the ability to come close to the ES CPUs. Roman and Massman were able to set two new WRs with the i7-4770K ES CPU we tested before.

• WR Wprime 32 at 6302MHz
• WR Wprime 1024 at 6198MHz

Dino pulled off a 7Ghz validation in the other bench room. For the rest loads of debugging, tweaking, drinking and fooling around !

Thanks very much Gigabyte for this unique opportunity ! Great hardware, ace company, food and beer !

Two great articles about that day can be found here:

• Anandtech by Borandi: Competitive Overclocking
• Ninjalane by Dennis: Post Computex Overclocking at GigaByte OC lab
  

Our last day in Taipei was spent at the MSI HQ. The event allowed us to play with MSI's latest Z87 XPOWER mainboard. Plus that after the event all participants could give feedback on the boards layout, behaviour during the entire session. Dennis Garcia from Ninjalane.com was again present and also did a small article about the MSI Workshop. You can read all about it here.

One can never have too many Lightnings, plz share Roman plz. Cooling down the stock cooler Lightnings with LN2.

Big thanks to Manny, Jon (Elmor), Dennis en Leona for this nice opportunity, kuddos MSI !

Jon (Elmor), Christian Ney                               8-pack, Young Pro and Hiwa Pouri

Sayaa aka Sascha Krohn                            John Lam and Splave

Dennis from MSI                               Otis and Kaysta from G.Skill

SOF from Awardfabrik                        Roman and El Masman

Finn and Roman (again)                                Birthday boys

Zolio, Hicookie and Young Pro                              Dinos22 and 8-Pack

Tim H and Cpt Planet                            Gamer and Alva

Trouffman and zolkorn                  Massman                             Dennis Garcia

Upcoming parents !               A guy with a rucksack              Marc Beer and Sin0822

Strange people wondering in the streets of Taipei, it's the ASRock twins !

Where can you find people playing smartphone games with an audience, only in Taipei.

Scooters, scooters and more scooters, even the Hell's Angels must be riding these.

Our quiet street below, with a shot of the appartment building. Thanks for arranging this PJ and Finn.

Anyone looking for a PC store ? Apparently typical Taiwanese as they seem to group similar shops in one street.

Too bad all good things must come to an end. We had a blast during Computex 2013, nice new hardware, loads of stunning booth babes, parties and nice meals. The overclocking sessions were heaps of fun and very educational at some levels.

A big thank you goes out to Massman and lady Finn, who arranged our stay during the entire week. Without them things would have certainly gone wrong as most of us were first timers in Taipei. Thanks to the great bunch of people that we met during our 10 days abroad. Especially Gamer and Roman that had to put up with my wining 24/7 lol. So nice to meet so many old friends, looking forward meeting you lot again soon !

Thank you Bernice and Gina from Gigabyte for arranging the factory tour and to allow us to have a go in the OC lab.

To the MSI crew (Dennis, Eric , Manny and Lenoa) for the OC workshop and to arrange the cab:) Wished we could have stayed a bit longer.

Nick from ASRock for paing our meal at Chillys

The Tones PC shop for supplying us with the Madshrimps logos

Frank from G.Skill for inviting us to the Club Myst

Joost from OCZ for the Spark tickets for the Fatal1ty showdown