The Mini Forum em680 Ultra Mini PC is a tiny micro PC that measures 80 by 80 by 43 millimeters, similar to a Raspberry Pi case like SilverStone Pi O2. This compact device boasts an 8-core Ryzen 6800U processor and up to 32 gigabytes of soldered DDR5 memory. The em680 also features a PCIe Gen 4 M.2 slot for storage, which is impressive considering its small form factor.

The em680 Ultra Mini PC comes in three different memory and storage configurations, ranging from $400 to $490. Despite its compact size, it offers a range of connectivity options, including three USB Type-A ports, two USB 4 Type-C ports, HDMI, a combined audio jack, and a Micro SD card reader. However, one of the type-C ports is used for power, which means that users lose access to that port.

Cooler Master had an impressive booth at Computex, showcasing a range of innovative products. The company's new next-gen 3D VC cooler combines a vapor chamber with a CPU and does something different by opening up the channel between the heat pipes, cold plate, and vapor chamber. This is similar to the Ice Giant coolers minus the circulatory element and hopefully more effective. Cooler Master also demonstrated its new MA824 Stealth Air Cooler, which was coated with heat-reactive paint that provided an interesting look at how heat moves through a tower cooler fin stack.

One of the coolest (pun intended) demos by Cooler Master was their concept for a tool-less assembly case. Their ATX case allowed motherboard mounting without any screws, essentially allowing users to snap it into place. While not exactly the same as the Open Benchtable, which is horizontal and requires keeping things tensioned differently, the idea is similar – to develop mounting systems that make building PCs easier.

Kyle's Bitwood also had a video showcasing Cooler Master's streaming tech products, including some new stream deck competitor-type devices. The video gave viewers an insight into what Cooler Master has been working on in this space. In addition to these tech-related news pieces, the article will continue with more content from the show, including interviews and other updates.

Thanks for watching! To support our endeavors, please visit store.gamersaccess.net. We fund all of the flights, hotels, wages, food, and everything else that is needed for travel through audience support. This allows us to provide quality content, such as this article, without any interruptions or sponsorships. Your support is greatly appreciated and helps us continue to bring you the latest news and updates from Computex. We'll be back with more content soon, so stay tuned!

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enhere when we're back in the studio and we have a hardware news recap for the week for you in addition to all of the other Hardware news it's been a crazy week in this one we'll be talking about alcohol's metal fan Intel's single slot GPU that is technically between the A380 and the a750 in both price and in theory the actual GPU silicon and we'll be going over the back door that was found in gigabytes motherboards including how gigabyte creates a user account on your windows install without telling or asking you before that this video is brought to you by thermal Grizzly and the cryo sheet graphene pads these cryo sheets are molecularly stacked in the z-axis to encourage vertical direct thermal transfer from the IHS to the cooler cryo sheet pads are made to be easily applicable for a thermal interface and completely avoid Pace dry out because it's not paced it makes them particularly useful for Law and service life systems with minimal maintenance they come in multiple sizes for suitability on the most common laptops and desktop CPUs and you can learn more at the thermal Grizzly cryo sheets at the link in the description below first of all just a quick computex debrief for you we had a ton of awesome collaborations the last few days of the show and honestly I love the style of content we're able to produce during these shows it doesn't last forever to Temporary style change but I wanted to give some insight for why we like it so much first of all all all of the vendors were shocked when they found out that we had published 10 videos in two days and the team is just three of us for travel so for this one it was me Vitaly and Mike on the Travel team we don't send any of the content back so that's your behind the scenes Insight we do it all locally when we're on location shooting filming editing scripting all that stuff it's done in the same place the same three people so the ground crew is super lean and efficient and I'm really proud of the work that our team did because not only was the output volume high but we managed to keep the quality standard pretty high despite when you're on the ground for a new show you're always trading off some quality for just like quick access to information that needs to go up quickly as well because it's something everyone's covering so we're able to keep a kind of cool sort of angle for everything like with noctua getting one of their technical people on The Talk engineering but as a reminder there's always temporary so it's about three weeks of content like this we have the last two we have one more going and then it's kind of back to normal but with some improvements and that's what I wanted to share so for just sharing some insight what do these shows allow us to do they give us inspiration and reinvigorate us to do what we already love doing except even more of it with new cool stuff coming out we also come back home with a ton of unique and fun content ideas and those won't only be in line with what we normally do but even more advanced sometimes these shows allow us new access like talking to Engineers who otherwise wouldn't get to meet us because they have to communicate through PR normally and the idea formulation here doesn't happen without a change of scenery and a Collide of Industry Minds at a show this hasn't happened for like four years years so it was awesome talking to people like Wendell Gordon Leo everyone else we ran into knocked to his technical team and all the others we work with and we learned a lot and thought about some challenges and new ways of course it also allows us to see what's coming up in person and experience technology Hands-On rather than through press releases and we get to explore Taipei which is always fun it's actually vitalia's first time out there on the team as well and he and I are both looking forward to going back for some more content can't can't talk about what it is yet but we have some really unique stuff lined up in the investigation area of things and one history Italian piece and that's going to require us going back out there but anyway uh other stuff you should be aware of there was an awesome joint effort that pothope out of nowhere from Wendell from level one tax where that video is on the channel but I just asked them hey can you come complain about all the RGB and sensor issues where everything's proprietary he said yes but also I'd like to work with you along Launch Open pleb and uh I so the the context for this I messaged them and he said yeah sure I'll join and then like six hours later he so I have this idea and um and that's something we're actually doing it's uh going to be an organization that will hopefully open up licensing documentation and knowledge bases for all of these different proprietary solutions to help standardize them a little bit and get pledges from the companies to basically not Sue each other for just using the pin out that's what we want to see whether this is successful I don't know I mean it's you're talking about big companies that have a lot of inertia they have a lot of money invested it's worked it worked with open compute in the server market and that's like much higher stakes and way more advanced technology so there is a road map for this type of thing work and it's a proven model we don't know if our version of this will work working with Wendell and GN uh combined but I guess what we're going for here is sort of we're gonna try and if it doesn't work then at least we tried to be a part of the solution and not just complain but I do feel pretty good about it because at least sort of what GN brings to the table is a audience that'll listen to me ranting and also a decent relationship with some of the higher up people at some of these smaller companies especially so I think we can maybe make something happen and then Wendell brings this massive amount of knowledge and background on how these things have worked in the past so that's really cool go check out that video there's another note here we have a Content slowdown coming up so we just produced a ton of stuff it was like 20 plus videos in two weeks so we're gonna slow it down a little bit this will probably be in another week or two but we want to overhaul some of gn's internal systems completely so that'll be changes to QC pipelines we want to build production pipelines and methods to get GN extras going in a higher capacity planning to overhaul some test benches with new hardware and methodologies so we're planning to slow down on the uploads during this time as a strategic decision to reallocate some of our efforts to build a more stable foundation and we've done this in the past I think last time we did this a lot of you commented when we came back like oh wow that was really impactful so we're planning to do that again because we just if we're publishing multiple times a week it's really hard to ever actually improve things and you're just trying to maintain and so we have to have these pauses to still work internally but uh maybe a little bit lower hours and just kind of improve stuff and then come back refreshed so on my end I need some time to work on some test engineering Patrick coins work on some software stuff like that and uh some team members have time off coming coming up anyway so it's good timing for that but before we hit that period we have some really unique lab tours from amd's facility we never got around to publishing during all the burning motherboards things so those are done they're coming up in the next week or so and then we have some factory tours and more so that's the recap for computex some of the content we were excited about I just I mean it's been the first time in four years we've done this a lot of you never got to see our old coverage you've seen it now hopefully you liked it and even if you didn't what I wanted to share here is like okay so if you don't like the coverage at least you understand why we go and how it benefits the whole Channel and the health of the channel and the team and it's not just about like only the news for Hands-On at a show there's all of this knock-on effect stuff all this inspiration that comes and really excites us to work on what we're doing access to Engineers all of that's very important and um I think sometimes people don't really get that part so that's why I wanted to share okay backdoor and gigabyte motherboards this will be fun while we were away at computex giveaway had the lid blown off of a potential security vulnerability by research company eclipsium specifically the issue raised was with motherboards automatically downloaded and installing gigabytes App Center Software in an insecure manner fundamentally this is the same thing that Asus does with Armory crate which is also bad and also had exploits that were patched previously and probably has more in there the firmware or the bios for gigabyte has a small binary that automatically installs itself and to Windows it then automatically pulls down the software from gigabyte servers aside from this being an egregious violation of user trust this is also concerning because gigabytes have the most secure company they they had their entire like RMA Center breached previously and also companies tend to forget about and accidentally abandon these types of servers and they just become these huge attack factors worse still is that gigabyte set it up without signature verification of the executable or verification that the remote server provided the files had valid certificates gigabyte's own statement lists these changes in its latest bios so we know this to be fact the full write-up by eclipseum doesn't have evidence that this security hole has actually been utilized but does list several other similar situations where it was the researchers explain how exactly this works so go check that out if you're curious but eclipsium has been compiling a list of all affected motherboard models which so far has 406 entries at the time of writing just essentially looks like every motherboard all the way back to the 500 series chipsets on Intel and 400 AMD for gigabyte are affected the worst case scenario here would be a supply chain attack where a bad actor would be able to plant malicious code within either the binary that loads from bios or in the software it pulls down from remote servers longer term there's also the possibility of those URLs being abandoned by gigabyte later and being co-opted by Bad actors leading then old motherboards to just automatically pull down malware this isn't all though people on Twitter immediately started looking into it and found at some point in the install process for control center it secretly creates a user account named GCC underscore file drop the user account has a password though so don't worry it's secure the password is gbt123 GCC and that can be used to authenticate any PC that has the software installed this is obviously a huge problem we all know that passwords should be one two three three four five one two three is just insecure but there's another problem anywhere you have network access to other PCS this could be an attack Vector the user account doesn't have administrative privileges but for attackers who know what they're doing that's not much of a hurdle to cause damage there are two ways you can mitigate the situation the first one is to immediately update BIOS on your gigabyte motherboards and hopefully that just solves it the second one is you can block URLs targeted by the local executable and eclipsium has those listed near the bottom of its press release again the practices of force installing software and making the hidden user accounts they're just gross that is literally malware that's what that is that's what gigabyte and Asus are both making when they install this stuff without any kind of user sign off on it whatsoever and whether that's bios or not it's at least just annoying if not insecure and concerning both Asus and gigabyte have toggles in their bios to turn these features completely off we actually use them on our test systems for Asus and you should probably go in and disable those before you ever boot or install Windows the problem with having a toggle that defaults to on is that the user has to know it exists to benefit from turning it off and they don't want to default it's off because then they wouldn't be able to install their user tracking malware on your system either way the actual best solution would be for motherboard manufacturers to stop doing this but short of that you could buy from someone else up next a new Intel single slot GPU this is in the professional category but it's part of the arc family and this is the arc Pro a60 so this thing being single slot is already interesting because those are rare now the Shroud is simple with the black and blue coloring it has a blower fan that's open to draw air in on both sides of the card and push it through the cooler and it can drop to 130 Watts on a 6 pin pcie connector it'll probably be loud when trying to cool 130 Watts but the PCB itself is relatively short indicated by the back shot of the card the pro A6 he has 12 gigabytes of ddr6 on a 192-bit bus for a bandwidth of 384 gigabytes per second that's nearly 100 gigabytes per second more than the 4060 TI although there's more to it than that I wonder if this can play crisis only Gamers know that joke the GB dye is called the acmg-12 and it's new to the arc lineup it sits between the a750 and the A380 and basically every metric it'll also be available for laptops as the a60m albeit with only eight gigabytes of memory and a reduced to 95 Watt peak power Intel also points out that this GPU will work for basic Ray tracing tasks while being able to work in tandem with compute engines or AI accelerators found in the current and upcoming CPUs this is done with Intel's hyper compute and hyper-encode Technologies the rumored price is 175 dollars and compared to the gaming a750 that's not that interesting because the a750 has been anywhere from as low as 200 lately up to 250 but this isn't really meant to be a gaming card a little bit different it is cheaper and as far as professional cards go it's actually one of the cheapest current generation right now so uh not a bad price for a pro card considering that AMD and Nvidia have not only abandoned this part of the market for gaming but also for professional users ultimately though it's aimed at people who want a slim profile card Apple up next the company has a new toolkit for porting games to Mac OS normally we don't talk about Apple because the audience that they indoctrinate doesn't really overlap with ours that much but this time there's something different the new toolkit offers an emulation environment to run unmodified Windows games on Apple's processors you think of it like wine or proton for games running on Linux Apple's emulator is notable since Apple CPUs are arm designs since the M1 onward and are incompatible with x86 instructions this allows developers to see their games running on the platform before doing any major work Apple's developer focused video for the tool shows the windows version of the medium launching and running without any alterations after this the video shows a stats overlay that's part of a login feature to help developers identify problems that need to be fixed or optimized in the actual Port these stats dump to a log that can be scrutinized later the emulator tool isn't a free ticket though to running any and all game games on Mac OS as the emulation itself adds a lot of compute overhead that puts a major dent in overall performance Apple shows this here in the side by side with the unmodified version on the left and the full port running natively on the right up next Microsoft announced that it's ending support for Cortana on Windows 10 and 11 and instead moving to fully integrate its copilot feature all the AI Trend included uh as an assistant within Windows to replace Cortana a Windows co-pilot is confusingly using the same name as GitHub copilot but Microsoft owns GitHub so there's probably crossover Microsoft wants this co-pilot to have broad capabilities to change Windows settings which you'll need the help with since they keep moving them into new tabs that are completely impossible to use or assist with productivity tasks by processing natural language queries from the user it'll sit on the taskbar like Cortana does now but will open a persistent sidebar once activated from there you can do almost anything apparently with examples including copy and paste what a hell of a feature to list you just open up the sidebar and type in please help me copy and paste this thing and somehow that seems more efficient than just doing it yourself you can also do more interesting things like find flights or rewrite a section of text for you in addition to the native capabilities it'll also have plugins available for connecting to other services like searching the internet with bin or using llm capabilities of chat gbt Windows Code Pilot will be available in the preview of Windows 11 sometime this month we're not sure why Microsoft didn't just add the new features to Cortana because it sounds like it's basically just a more advanced version of the same thing they were trying to do probably has to do with branding consistency although Cortana was at least a cool nod to gaming with the HALO Series now at computax there were a ton of cool things to look at and we didn't see them all despite arriving in Taiwan a whole week in advance of the show so this section will be a kind of Rapid Fire Round Up of the relevant stuff in PC Hardware that we didn't get to see personally or if we did we didn't get a chance to write write it up uh Tommy thanks just so you know it's massive it takes place across a few different hotels in Taipei area mostly near 101 and then there's also two convention centers that are multiple floors just for perspective even if you don't know anything about any of these places we only got to spend time in uh one of the hotels where most of the meeting Suites are and one of the convention centers so we actually didn't even walk into the other convention hall at all so we missed anything that was in there and we still published over 20 videos and it would have been physically impossible to see any of the other stuff so there's some cool things to talk about by the way my personal favorite video from the show I think was probably our in-win Design Center tour we kind of published it with the title in being about products so the modular cases the it's almost a parody of itself but we had a different thumbnail originally and basically to try and boost the performance because I really wanted that video to get views because it's so cool and interesting I had to figure out how to get people to click on it while still reflecting the content of the video I.E not becoming clickbait so we put the words big computer pointed an arrow at the massive computer they were building and that's the one you should go check out if you haven't seen it but the actual content for it in addition to big computer is the design center tour and that play it's so cool to see the behind the scenes of how this stuff is made and designed we don't really get to see that so anyway that was my favorite video but let's talk about some of the stuff we didn't get to see there but came out Alpha cool is mostly known for water cooling parts but uh this year it showed off a new fan and that is a metal framed fan it's worth paying attention to this is the Apex stealth from alpha cool and it has a zinc frame so Metal Frames have been done before Liam Lee has done them actually they used to make their fan frames out of aluminum but what makes this different is that the Fan's motor and the impeller are completely disconnected and decoupled from the frame alphacool claims this results in much lower noise compared to the other fans in the market across the entire RPM range Alpha cool did this by sandwiching the entire inner plastic fan parts between the outer frame pieces with O-rings this isolates the vibrations of the actual fan from its mounting Alpha Cool Zone charts if they're accurate paint an impressive picture of the Fan's performance the noise chart has the fan that has the purple line below all the others and it shows the fan ranging from about 20 DBA at 1250 RPM to about 27 DBA at 2400 RPM while absolute values are completely useless and totally dependent on test conditions in this situation they probably tested all these things in the same place with the same methods so at least against themselves they should be comparable and that number then for Alpha cool is way better than the rest shown switching to the airflow graph shows a big jump in performance as well next is the minis Forum em680 Ultra Mini PC this thing is Tiny it is 0.25 5 liters in volume it is a micro PC basically because only 80 by 80 by 43 millimeters and for reference that's similar to a Raspberry Pi case like silver Stones Pi O2 the em680 has an 8 core ryzen 6800u up to 32 gigabytes of solder ddr5 memory and it has a pcie Gen 4 m.2 slot for storage Mini's forum is partially addressing cool in by using liquid metal like it's done for PCS in the past hopefully this time they actually put it in there and there's as much I O as you could hope for given the form factor with three USB type A ports two USB 4 type c ports HDMI a combined audio jack and a Micro SD card reader there's no dedicated power plug as it uses either of the type C ports for power so you lose one of those the em680 is available in three different memory and storage configurations and ranges from 400 to 490 dollars and Cooler Master had a massive amount of products to show off we didn't make it over there this year we went to their HQ in December so we showed some stuff there but there's some new things and Paul from Paul's Hardware had an excellent video from cooler Masters headquarters for this new stuff definitely go check it out he also had a really cool video that showed some of the like sort of actual culture and behind the scenes of computex to like I mean what does it look like from ground level not just zoomed in on the product level he gives us more perspective for the show I really enjoyed that video you should watch that uh very different very fun and sort of uh it gives a real look at it but anyway one of the more interesting things that Paul showed is the next gen 3D VC cooler which is 3D Vapor chamber and this cooler uh it combines a vapor chamber for the Coldplay contact with a CPU and does something different by opening up the channel between the Heat pipes the cold plate to sort of integrate them with the vapor chamber vaguely this is similar to the ice giant coolers minus the circulatory element and hopefully more effective keeping it with the cooler theme Cooler Master also had a pretty cool demo set up with its new ma824 stealth air cooler the part that made this fun was that they coated it with heat reactive paint so it provides an interesting look at how the heat how the energy moves to fully saturate a tower cooler fin stack and it shows how quickly it moves while not the most scientific representation and it's actually a super cool demonstration of things and uh not sure if they're going to productize the color changing paint part of it but they probably should because that'd just be a neat feature of the product assuming you're not throwing away a bunch of performance or introducing new problems of some kind so that was kind of cool to see and uh is honestly one of the most interesting Tech demos I've seen in a long time or something so simple but complex keeping with uh Cooler Master here for one last part they had some cases there they were mostly Concepts one of them was a case ATX case that allowed motherboard Mountain without any screws so it's a tool-less assembly where they sort of snap it into place now the Open Bench table kind of does this except it's a bench so it's horizontal a little different and the requirement for keeping things tensioned is different but the idea is just to all this mounting systems now they had another one that was similar to the nr200p Max and that they are planning some semi-built bundles to drive down total cost those would include a liquid cooler and a power supply inside the case pre-installed and like we said there were a ton of products at cooler Master's Booth uh Kyle bitwood also had a video showing off some of their cool streaming Tech and uh basically like stream deck competitor type products not steam deck stream deck so we have to make the differentiation now but it was a lot of fun we still have more content coming up so we've got one more interview with their Bauer we have the video with Wendell is posted now go check that out it's awesome we have a couple of other sort of news pieces from the show I think there's maybe one more interview and then that's going to be it we're kind of back to normal other than the AMD lab tours so thanks for watching subscribe for more as always go to store.gamersaccess.net if you want to support our endeavors for all this type of reporting because we fund all of the flights hotels the wages everything food everything that is needed for travel uh we pay for that and a lot of that is because of our support from our audience so thank you for the support subscribe for more we'll see you all next timehere when we're back in the studio and we have a hardware news recap for the week for you in addition to all of the other Hardware news it's been a crazy week in this one we'll be talking about alcohol's metal fan Intel's single slot GPU that is technically between the A380 and the a750 in both price and in theory the actual GPU silicon and we'll be going over the back door that was found in gigabytes motherboards including how gigabyte creates a user account on your windows install without telling or asking you before that this video is brought to you by thermal Grizzly and the cryo sheet graphene pads these cryo sheets are molecularly stacked in the z-axis to encourage vertical direct thermal transfer from the IHS to the cooler cryo sheet pads are made to be easily applicable for a thermal interface and completely avoid Pace dry out because it's not paced it makes them particularly useful for Law and service life systems with minimal maintenance they come in multiple sizes for suitability on the most common laptops and desktop CPUs and you can learn more at the thermal Grizzly cryo sheets at the link in the description below first of all just a quick computex debrief for you we had a ton of awesome collaborations the last few days of the show and honestly I love the style of content we're able to produce during these shows it doesn't last forever to Temporary style change but I wanted to give some insight for why we like it so much first of all all all of the vendors were shocked when they found out that we had published 10 videos in two days and the team is just three of us for travel so for this one it was me Vitaly and Mike on the Travel team we don't send any of the content back so that's your behind the scenes Insight we do it all locally when we're on location shooting filming editing scripting all that stuff it's done in the same place the same three people so the ground crew is super lean and efficient and I'm really proud of the work that our team did because not only was the output volume high but we managed to keep the quality standard pretty high despite when you're on the ground for a new show you're always trading off some quality for just like quick access to information that needs to go up quickly as well because it's something everyone's covering so we're able to keep a kind of cool sort of angle for everything like with noctua getting one of their technical people on The Talk engineering but as a reminder there's always temporary so it's about three weeks of content like this we have the last two we have one more going and then it's kind of back to normal but with some improvements and that's what I wanted to share so for just sharing some insight what do these shows allow us to do they give us inspiration and reinvigorate us to do what we already love doing except even more of it with new cool stuff coming out we also come back home with a ton of unique and fun content ideas and those won't only be in line with what we normally do but even more advanced sometimes these shows allow us new access like talking to Engineers who otherwise wouldn't get to meet us because they have to communicate through PR normally and the idea formulation here doesn't happen without a change of scenery and a Collide of Industry Minds at a show this hasn't happened for like four years years so it was awesome talking to people like Wendell Gordon Leo everyone else we ran into knocked to his technical team and all the others we work with and we learned a lot and thought about some challenges and new ways of course it also allows us to see what's coming up in person and experience technology Hands-On rather than through press releases and we get to explore Taipei which is always fun it's actually vitalia's first time out there on the team as well and he and I are both looking forward to going back for some more content can't can't talk about what it is yet but we have some really unique stuff lined up in the investigation area of things and one history Italian piece and that's going to require us going back out there but anyway uh other stuff you should be aware of there was an awesome joint effort that pothope out of nowhere from Wendell from level one tax where that video is on the channel but I just asked them hey can you come complain about all the RGB and sensor issues where everything's proprietary he said yes but also I'd like to work with you along Launch Open pleb and uh I so the the context for this I messaged them and he said yeah sure I'll join and then like six hours later he so I have this idea and um and that's something we're actually doing it's uh going to be an organization that will hopefully open up licensing documentation and knowledge bases for all of these different proprietary solutions to help standardize them a little bit and get pledges from the companies to basically not Sue each other for just using the pin out that's what we want to see whether this is successful I don't know I mean it's you're talking about big companies that have a lot of inertia they have a lot of money invested it's worked it worked with open compute in the server market and that's like much higher stakes and way more advanced technology so there is a road map for this type of thing work and it's a proven model we don't know if our version of this will work working with Wendell and GN uh combined but I guess what we're going for here is sort of we're gonna try and if it doesn't work then at least we tried to be a part of the solution and not just complain but I do feel pretty good about it because at least sort of what GN brings to the table is a audience that'll listen to me ranting and also a decent relationship with some of the higher up people at some of these smaller companies especially so I think we can maybe make something happen and then Wendell brings this massive amount of knowledge and background on how these things have worked in the past so that's really cool go check out that video there's another note here we have a Content slowdown coming up so we just produced a ton of stuff it was like 20 plus videos in two weeks so we're gonna slow it down a little bit this will probably be in another week or two but we want to overhaul some of gn's internal systems completely so that'll be changes to QC pipelines we want to build production pipelines and methods to get GN extras going in a higher capacity planning to overhaul some test benches with new hardware and methodologies so we're planning to slow down on the uploads during this time as a strategic decision to reallocate some of our efforts to build a more stable foundation and we've done this in the past I think last time we did this a lot of you commented when we came back like oh wow that was really impactful so we're planning to do that again because we just if we're publishing multiple times a week it's really hard to ever actually improve things and you're just trying to maintain and so we have to have these pauses to still work internally but uh maybe a little bit lower hours and just kind of improve stuff and then come back refreshed so on my end I need some time to work on some test engineering Patrick coins work on some software stuff like that and uh some team members have time off coming coming up anyway so it's good timing for that but before we hit that period we have some really unique lab tours from amd's facility we never got around to publishing during all the burning motherboards things so those are done they're coming up in the next week or so and then we have some factory tours and more so that's the recap for computex some of the content we were excited about I just I mean it's been the first time in four years we've done this a lot of you never got to see our old coverage you've seen it now hopefully you liked it and even if you didn't what I wanted to share here is like okay so if you don't like the coverage at least you understand why we go and how it benefits the whole Channel and the health of the channel and the team and it's not just about like only the news for Hands-On at a show there's all of this knock-on effect stuff all this inspiration that comes and really excites us to work on what we're doing access to Engineers all of that's very important and um I think sometimes people don't really get that part so that's why I wanted to share okay backdoor and gigabyte motherboards this will be fun while we were away at computex giveaway had the lid blown off of a potential security vulnerability by research company eclipsium specifically the issue raised was with motherboards automatically downloaded and installing gigabytes App Center Software in an insecure manner fundamentally this is the same thing that Asus does with Armory crate which is also bad and also had exploits that were patched previously and probably has more in there the firmware or the bios for gigabyte has a small binary that automatically installs itself and to Windows it then automatically pulls down the software from gigabyte servers aside from this being an egregious violation of user trust this is also concerning because gigabytes have the most secure company they they had their entire like RMA Center breached previously and also companies tend to forget about and accidentally abandon these types of servers and they just become these huge attack factors worse still is that gigabyte set it up without signature verification of the executable or verification that the remote server provided the files had valid certificates gigabyte's own statement lists these changes in its latest bios so we know this to be fact the full write-up by eclipseum doesn't have evidence that this security hole has actually been utilized but does list several other similar situations where it was the researchers explain how exactly this works so go check that out if you're curious but eclipsium has been compiling a list of all affected motherboard models which so far has 406 entries at the time of writing just essentially looks like every motherboard all the way back to the 500 series chipsets on Intel and 400 AMD for gigabyte are affected the worst case scenario here would be a supply chain attack where a bad actor would be able to plant malicious code within either the binary that loads from bios or in the software it pulls down from remote servers longer term there's also the possibility of those URLs being abandoned by gigabyte later and being co-opted by Bad actors leading then old motherboards to just automatically pull down malware this isn't all though people on Twitter immediately started looking into it and found at some point in the install process for control center it secretly creates a user account named GCC underscore file drop the user account has a password though so don't worry it's secure the password is gbt123 GCC and that can be used to authenticate any PC that has the software installed this is obviously a huge problem we all know that passwords should be one two three three four five one two three is just insecure but there's another problem anywhere you have network access to other PCS this could be an attack Vector the user account doesn't have administrative privileges but for attackers who know what they're doing that's not much of a hurdle to cause damage there are two ways you can mitigate the situation the first one is to immediately update BIOS on your gigabyte motherboards and hopefully that just solves it the second one is you can block URLs targeted by the local executable and eclipsium has those listed near the bottom of its press release again the practices of force installing software and making the hidden user accounts they're just gross that is literally malware that's what that is that's what gigabyte and Asus are both making when they install this stuff without any kind of user sign off on it whatsoever and whether that's bios or not it's at least just annoying if not insecure and concerning both Asus and gigabyte have toggles in their bios to turn these features completely off we actually use them on our test systems for Asus and you should probably go in and disable those before you ever boot or install Windows the problem with having a toggle that defaults to on is that the user has to know it exists to benefit from turning it off and they don't want to default it's off because then they wouldn't be able to install their user tracking malware on your system either way the actual best solution would be for motherboard manufacturers to stop doing this but short of that you could buy from someone else up next a new Intel single slot GPU this is in the professional category but it's part of the arc family and this is the arc Pro a60 so this thing being single slot is already interesting because those are rare now the Shroud is simple with the black and blue coloring it has a blower fan that's open to draw air in on both sides of the card and push it through the cooler and it can drop to 130 Watts on a 6 pin pcie connector it'll probably be loud when trying to cool 130 Watts but the PCB itself is relatively short indicated by the back shot of the card the pro A6 he has 12 gigabytes of ddr6 on a 192-bit bus for a bandwidth of 384 gigabytes per second that's nearly 100 gigabytes per second more than the 4060 TI although there's more to it than that I wonder if this can play crisis only Gamers know that joke the GB dye is called the acmg-12 and it's new to the arc lineup it sits between the a750 and the A380 and basically every metric it'll also be available for laptops as the a60m albeit with only eight gigabytes of memory and a reduced to 95 Watt peak power Intel also points out that this GPU will work for basic Ray tracing tasks while being able to work in tandem with compute engines or AI accelerators found in the current and upcoming CPUs this is done with Intel's hyper compute and hyper-encode Technologies the rumored price is 175 dollars and compared to the gaming a750 that's not that interesting because the a750 has been anywhere from as low as 200 lately up to 250 but this isn't really meant to be a gaming card a little bit different it is cheaper and as far as professional cards go it's actually one of the cheapest current generation right now so uh not a bad price for a pro card considering that AMD and Nvidia have not only abandoned this part of the market for gaming but also for professional users ultimately though it's aimed at people who want a slim profile card Apple up next the company has a new toolkit for porting games to Mac OS normally we don't talk about Apple because the audience that they indoctrinate doesn't really overlap with ours that much but this time there's something different the new toolkit offers an emulation environment to run unmodified Windows games on Apple's processors you think of it like wine or proton for games running on Linux Apple's emulator is notable since Apple CPUs are arm designs since the M1 onward and are incompatible with x86 instructions this allows developers to see their games running on the platform before doing any major work Apple's developer focused video for the tool shows the windows version of the medium launching and running without any alterations after this the video shows a stats overlay that's part of a login feature to help developers identify problems that need to be fixed or optimized in the actual Port these stats dump to a log that can be scrutinized later the emulator tool isn't a free ticket though to running any and all game games on Mac OS as the emulation itself adds a lot of compute overhead that puts a major dent in overall performance Apple shows this here in the side by side with the unmodified version on the left and the full port running natively on the right up next Microsoft announced that it's ending support for Cortana on Windows 10 and 11 and instead moving to fully integrate its copilot feature all the AI Trend included uh as an assistant within Windows to replace Cortana a Windows co-pilot is confusingly using the same name as GitHub copilot but Microsoft owns GitHub so there's probably crossover Microsoft wants this co-pilot to have broad capabilities to change Windows settings which you'll need the help with since they keep moving them into new tabs that are completely impossible to use or assist with productivity tasks by processing natural language queries from the user it'll sit on the taskbar like Cortana does now but will open a persistent sidebar once activated from there you can do almost anything apparently with examples including copy and paste what a hell of a feature to list you just open up the sidebar and type in please help me copy and paste this thing and somehow that seems more efficient than just doing it yourself you can also do more interesting things like find flights or rewrite a section of text for you in addition to the native capabilities it'll also have plugins available for connecting to other services like searching the internet with bin or using llm capabilities of chat gbt Windows Code Pilot will be available in the preview of Windows 11 sometime this month we're not sure why Microsoft didn't just add the new features to Cortana because it sounds like it's basically just a more advanced version of the same thing they were trying to do probably has to do with branding consistency although Cortana was at least a cool nod to gaming with the HALO Series now at computax there were a ton of cool things to look at and we didn't see them all despite arriving in Taiwan a whole week in advance of the show so this section will be a kind of Rapid Fire Round Up of the relevant stuff in PC Hardware that we didn't get to see personally or if we did we didn't get a chance to write write it up uh Tommy thanks just so you know it's massive it takes place across a few different hotels in Taipei area mostly near 101 and then there's also two convention centers that are multiple floors just for perspective even if you don't know anything about any of these places we only got to spend time in uh one of the hotels where most of the meeting Suites are and one of the convention centers so we actually didn't even walk into the other convention hall at all so we missed anything that was in there and we still published over 20 videos and it would have been physically impossible to see any of the other stuff so there's some cool things to talk about by the way my personal favorite video from the show I think was probably our in-win Design Center tour we kind of published it with the title in being about products so the modular cases the it's almost a parody of itself but we had a different thumbnail originally and basically to try and boost the performance because I really wanted that video to get views because it's so cool and interesting I had to figure out how to get people to click on it while still reflecting the content of the video I.E not becoming clickbait so we put the words big computer pointed an arrow at the massive computer they were building and that's the one you should go check out if you haven't seen it but the actual content for it in addition to big computer is the design center tour and that play it's so cool to see the behind the scenes of how this stuff is made and designed we don't really get to see that so anyway that was my favorite video but let's talk about some of the stuff we didn't get to see there but came out Alpha cool is mostly known for water cooling parts but uh this year it showed off a new fan and that is a metal framed fan it's worth paying attention to this is the Apex stealth from alpha cool and it has a zinc frame so Metal Frames have been done before Liam Lee has done them actually they used to make their fan frames out of aluminum but what makes this different is that the Fan's motor and the impeller are completely disconnected and decoupled from the frame alphacool claims this results in much lower noise compared to the other fans in the market across the entire RPM range Alpha cool did this by sandwiching the entire inner plastic fan parts between the outer frame pieces with O-rings this isolates the vibrations of the actual fan from its mounting Alpha Cool Zone charts if they're accurate paint an impressive picture of the Fan's performance the noise chart has the fan that has the purple line below all the others and it shows the fan ranging from about 20 DBA at 1250 RPM to about 27 DBA at 2400 RPM while absolute values are completely useless and totally dependent on test conditions in this situation they probably tested all these things in the same place with the same methods so at least against themselves they should be comparable and that number then for Alpha cool is way better than the rest shown switching to the airflow graph shows a big jump in performance as well next is the minis Forum em680 Ultra Mini PC this thing is Tiny it is 0.25 5 liters in volume it is a micro PC basically because only 80 by 80 by 43 millimeters and for reference that's similar to a Raspberry Pi case like silver Stones Pi O2 the em680 has an 8 core ryzen 6800u up to 32 gigabytes of solder ddr5 memory and it has a pcie Gen 4 m.2 slot for storage Mini's forum is partially addressing cool in by using liquid metal like it's done for PCS in the past hopefully this time they actually put it in there and there's as much I O as you could hope for given the form factor with three USB type A ports two USB 4 type c ports HDMI a combined audio jack and a Micro SD card reader there's no dedicated power plug as it uses either of the type C ports for power so you lose one of those the em680 is available in three different memory and storage configurations and ranges from 400 to 490 dollars and Cooler Master had a massive amount of products to show off we didn't make it over there this year we went to their HQ in December so we showed some stuff there but there's some new things and Paul from Paul's Hardware had an excellent video from cooler Masters headquarters for this new stuff definitely go check it out he also had a really cool video that showed some of the like sort of actual culture and behind the scenes of computex to like I mean what does it look like from ground level not just zoomed in on the product level he gives us more perspective for the show I really enjoyed that video you should watch that uh very different very fun and sort of uh it gives a real look at it but anyway one of the more interesting things that Paul showed is the next gen 3D VC cooler which is 3D Vapor chamber and this cooler uh it combines a vapor chamber for the Coldplay contact with a CPU and does something different by opening up the channel between the Heat pipes the cold plate to sort of integrate them with the vapor chamber vaguely this is similar to the ice giant coolers minus the circulatory element and hopefully more effective keeping it with the cooler theme Cooler Master also had a pretty cool demo set up with its new ma824 stealth air cooler the part that made this fun was that they coated it with heat reactive paint so it provides an interesting look at how the heat how the energy moves to fully saturate a tower cooler fin stack and it shows how quickly it moves while not the most scientific representation and it's actually a super cool demonstration of things and uh not sure if they're going to productize the color changing paint part of it but they probably should because that'd just be a neat feature of the product assuming you're not throwing away a bunch of performance or introducing new problems of some kind so that was kind of cool to see and uh is honestly one of the most interesting Tech demos I've seen in a long time or something so simple but complex keeping with uh Cooler Master here for one last part they had some cases there they were mostly Concepts one of them was a case ATX case that allowed motherboard Mountain without any screws so it's a tool-less assembly where they sort of snap it into place now the Open Bench table kind of does this except it's a bench so it's horizontal a little different and the requirement for keeping things tensioned is different but the idea is just to all this mounting systems now they had another one that was similar to the nr200p Max and that they are planning some semi-built bundles to drive down total cost those would include a liquid cooler and a power supply inside the case pre-installed and like we said there were a ton of products at cooler Master's Booth uh Kyle bitwood also had a video showing off some of their cool streaming Tech and uh basically like stream deck competitor type products not steam deck stream deck so we have to make the differentiation now but it was a lot of fun we still have more content coming up so we've got one more interview with their Bauer we have the video with Wendell is posted now go check that out it's awesome we have a couple of other sort of news pieces from the show I think there's maybe one more interview and then that's going to be it we're kind of back to normal other than the AMD lab tours so thanks for watching subscribe for more as always go to store.gamersaccess.net if you want to support our endeavors for all this type of reporting because we fund all of the flights hotels the wages everything food everything that is needed for travel uh we pay for that and a lot of that is because of our support from our audience so thank you for the support subscribe for more we'll see you all next time\n"