Wccftech’s Best of Computex 2023: PC Hardware & Technology Awards

After a 3 year hiatus, Comptuex was finally back this year in 2023 and after recovering from COVID from what was essentially a super-spreader event, I have finally been able to put together our remaining coverage from the show. Every Computex, we hand out 10 Best of Computex Awards to technology that is groundbreaking, extremely bold, bleeding edge, or simply the best. This year saw a mix of all of these technologies from the usual suspects as well as quite a few surprises. Here are all the 10 Best of Computex Awards in no particular order.

Frore Systems was probably the biggest surprise of Computex. A stealth startup managed to do the impossible and become the first company to roll out an active solid state cooling solution at scale that is not only more efficient but quieter than current fan-based tech. We have a detailed write up on Frore systems coming up but in the meanwhile you can see their CES presentation over here. Their AirJet Mini and AirJet Pro received our Best of Computex Award.

MSI has introduced a motherboard that competes with $1000 class of motherboards for half of the price. The MEG Z790 Ace Max featured Wifi 7 connectivity (5GbE as opposed to 10 GbE - but half the price) as well as all the features a high end gaming build could ask for. While competition was very tight this year, we felt this was the best bang for buck motherboard flagship on display at Comptuex for this category.

The Computex show floor was littered with impressive Gen5 NVME SSDs with absolutely ginormous heatsinks. We even saw products that had dual air and lqiuid cooling. However, one product stood out from the rest: Patriot's Viper PV553. This Gen5 NVME could not only hit the speeds typical of Gen5 SSDs but actually had an extremely low profile heatsink and a tiny blower fan that could get the job done. It is the only Gen5 NVME SSD that we are aware off that can fit under a GPU without throttling.

Enermax also had a very impressive Platimax Gemini PSU on display at their booth this time. While almost all modern PSUs shown now support ATX 3.0 standard, Enermax went one step further to future proof their offering. It is the world's first PSU to support both ATX 3.0 and the upcoming ATX 12VO standard. This means that if you are willing to pay the premium, this PSU is the most future-proof 1200W power supply you can buy on the market right now - making it very much worthy of our Best of Computex award.

NVIDIA needs no introduction and was one of the usual suspects for the best of Computex awards this year and we were not disappointed. The company unveiled the DGX GH200 super computer - which is a supercomputer that the company will build for any customer and contains up to 256 Grace Hopper super chips. The most impressive part of this is not just the fact that NVIDIA is offering this as a fully turnkey solution but that the entire supercomputer will show up as 1 single GPU - making it extremely easy to deploy and scale AI/datacenter applications.

If you are looking for simply the best possible motherboards, period, without budget being a concern then look no further than Gigabyte's new flagship Aorus X series which includes the Z790 AORUS XTREME X. These motherboards come with industry leading 10 GbE Wifi7 connectivity and are simply one of the best motherboards out there that you can buy.

Another very impressive offering this year was from ASUS which rolled out the world's first commercial carbon-neutral laptop that not only has all the certifications required for enterprise and business use but is made with up to 70% post-industrial recycled metal. With laptop and PC hardware companies increasingly looking to reduce or eliminate their carbon footprint this is a much needed move from industry leaders and very much deserves our Best of Computex Award. We will have detailed coverage on this laptop shortly as well.

Computex has always been about pushing the limits of hardware and the XPG Caster RGB 9000 DDR5 memory is no different. It is an OC stick that you can actually buy and is clocked at a mind boggling 9000 MT/s - which makes it one of the fastest off the shelf OC kits out there.

Speaking of pushing the limits and showmanship. G.Skill easily had the best overall booth presentation at Computex 2023. The overclocking competitions were back along with the wackiest looking cases we have ever seen (one included a functional beer dispenser!). And of course, all of this was topped off with some absolutely great product launches. G.Skill managed to capture the spirit of Comptuex quite well - and along with it - our Best of Computex Award.

Finally, we have BenQ with their new HT 4550i. This projector is a 4 channel LED projector boasting up to 30000 hours of source life and is factory calibrated to hit DCI-P3. Considering this boasts the 0.67 Texas Instruments chip which can achieve 4k with just a 2x pixel shift instead of a 4x pixel shift - this is very much deserving of our Best of Computex Award as well. It will be available later this month and our review on this will be up shortly as well.

Innovation comes in all shapes and sizes. Sometimes, fixing a huge problem can be as simple as changing the color scheme on your cables - and this is exactly what MSI has done. They have managed to simply and cost effectively solve one of the biggest issues with the ATX 2.0 600w cables: improper contact. These cables require a ton of pressure (I was not able to connect them using one hand) and if you see any yellow visible - then its not properly connected. This is a very easy fix to potentially a very costly problem and we give MSI a hat tip for solving it this easily.

A lot of cooling companies introduced magnetic and lego-like connection tech this Computex. But the implementation of Corsair is the one that truly stood out. The iCUE LINK system is a group of beautifully designed products that just *work* well together and will eliminate the wiring needs of even the most complex system quite easily.

That's all folks!