PC Powerplay Special Issue 2015

It is my pleasure and honour to once again introduce you to PC PowerPlay’s annual tech-fest, with pages stuffed to the brim with the latest in PC hardware. As the Tech Editor at PC PowerPlay and its sister magazine PC and Tech Authority, I get to see every major PC product release, and this special covers my hand-picked selection of the best of the best. PC gaming is a vastly different beast to the consoles, with cheaper game prices, a wider variety of genres and titles, and even our humble mouse/keyboard controls separating us from the tightly controlled ecosystems of the consoles. But it’s the PC’s ever evolving hardware that is the biggie, the thing that makes PC gaming the home of cutting edge technology, and the place to be…

01 MSI AX24 Available: 2015 • RRP: TBA It’s hard to sell people on the gaming viability of All in One systems, but with the AX24, MSI has a good chance of doing just that thanks to the upgradability of the platform and the fact that it makes a feature of the fact it can hold a full sized videocard. The 24” display is a little lacking in frills – it’s only 1920x1280 in the current model – but a large shoebox style enclosure for the back mounted GPU shouts out the unit’s potential power. MSI also says they are considering building a version of the AX24 with dual videocard support. If that doesn’t sell gamers on the possibilities of AiO systems, nothing will. 02 ASUS RoG G20 Available: Now…

We’d like to thank CORSAIR and GIGABYTE for sponsoring our trip to Computex 2015 CORSAIR BULLDOG In a year where exciting product announcements were harder to find than a sweat-free journalist in Taipei’s sauna-like humidity, Corsair’s big reveal stood head and shoulders above the pack. The Bulldog DIY 4K Gaming PC is a Small Form Factor, barebones machine designed to squat inside your home theatre AV rack, and comes packing a bunch of features that make this the top dog in town. We’re not too sure about the claims of it being 4K-ready, but it’s definitely the most impressive basis for a small gaming PC we’ve seen. While we don’t have the exact dimensions on hand, it’s slightly larger than the slim-line HTPC cases usually associated with the living room,…

Hosted high above Taipei in the world famous Taipei 101 skyscraper, Gigabyte’s VIP suite provided a welcome respite from the blaring booth babes and screaming speaker systems of the show floor. As expected, the first room was crammed wall to wall with brand new motherboards, and it was the new Skylake creations that caught our attention. GA-Z170X-GAMING G1 Emblazoned in stunning white heat shrouds, Gigabyte’s gorgeous new GAZ170X-Gaming G1 motherboard evokes the look of the Mechas that feature so prominently in modern Manga. At any moment we expected our PR host to press a button on the board that would transform it into a futuristic jet-fighter, but sadly that wasn’t to be. Thankfully there were plenty of other goodies that made Gigabyte’s new flagship gaming board worthy of our attention,…

It turns out we’ve been pronouncing this company’s name wrong since its inception, but luckily you’ll never know this (turns out it’s “Aww-russ”). The sister company to Gigabyte is renowned for delivering some of the finest gaming laptops that money can buy, and it took this year’s Computex as an opportunity to introduce us to the key new product in its range, the X5. AORUS X5 Welcome to the winner of the Computex Best Choice Award, Aorus’ stunning new slimline gaming laptop, the X5. Aorus claims this is the world’s most powerful lightweight gaming laptop, and it uses not one but twin GeForce GTX 965M GPUs running in SLI mode to accomplish this. The use of twin low-powered GPUs has allowed this 15.6 inch laptop be just 0.9 inches thick…

As one of the biggest consumer IT vendors in the world, we weren’t surprised to see MSI’s booth taking up more floorspace than an A380 SuperJumbo. And to our delight many of the new toys on offer were focused primarily at gamers, a market segment that MSI seems determined to nail. Here’s just a few of the products that caught our eye. MSI GTX 980 TI GAMING 6G NVIDIA was one of the few companies to release a major new product at Computex (*cough* AMD *cough*), and it was a killer. The new GeForce GTX 980 Ti is basically a slightly trimmed back Titan X GPU, with fairly minimal changes to the massive slab of silicon that powers its AU$1500 behemoth. MSI was one of the first companies to show…