We’re wrapping up our third day of Computex 2025 coverage, and it seems there’s no end to the fascinating hardware announced so far. There’s a lot of ground to cover for today, but also, be sure to see what’s previously been covered in our Day Zero, Day One, and Day Two stories and look at the Tom’s Hardware Computex 2025 hub.
Optical SSDs, Immersion-Cooled Workstations, Manjaro Linux Gaming Handhelds, 512GB G-Skill DDR5
Kioxia is determined to make optical SSDs more mainstream, and it was on hand at Computex to demonstrate the technology. Kioxia uses one of Kyocera’s Optinity PCIe cards, which delivers optical connectivity via PCIe 5.0. One of Kioxia’s CM7 Enterprise SSDs was attached to the Optinity PCIe card and was shown delivering identical performance to the same SSD using a traditional electrical connection.
While delivering the same performance as an existing solution isn’t by itself an impressive feat, what is remarkable is that Kioxia can offer this performance with optical cabling 30 meters in length (or greater). Kioxia also claims superior signal integrity that is more reliable in “challenging environments.”
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(Image credit: Future)
Heat is a boss-level enemy of high-performance PCs, and enthusiasts always look for new ways to improve cooling output. Enermax is no stranger to developing high-end components to deliver power and cool PC hardware, and its latest demo takes those efforts to the extreme. Witness the Cirrus Mk1, which uses two-phase liquid immersion cooling to efficiently transfer heat away from hardware components to an external heat exchanger.
The cooling system can handle up to 3,300 watts of power, and to demonstrate this capability, Enermax’s test system used an AMD Ryzen Threadripper 7960X processor and four GeForce RTX 5090 GPUs attached to a Gigabyte TRX50 AI-TOP motherboard. Powering everything (including the cooling system) were two Enermax Platimax II 2400 watt PSUs. The cooling Cirrus Mk1 alone costs $50,000 before you even think of adding hardware, so it’s definitely not for the average gaming enthusiast.
The market for handheld gaming PCs continues to explode, and the introduction of the Nintendo Switch 2 will likely further drive interest in the category. Zotac’s Zone 2 is the follow-up to last year’s Zone and features an AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 (rather than the handheld gaming PC-centric Ryzen Z2 Extreme). The system features a 7-inch 1080p display with a 120 Hz refresh rate, up to 32GB of LPDDR5x, and a 1TB PCIe 4.0 SSD. The system runs Manjaro Linux with KDE Plasma 6 and, most certainly, Proton to provide the broadest compatibility with games.
(Image credit: Tom’s Hardware)
If you are looking for extreme performance or capacity regarding DDR5 memory, G.Skill has you covered. On the former front, the company showcased 2x 24GB DDR5 memory using SK hynix ICs, hitting a speed of 10,934 MT/s on an ASUS ROG Maximus Z890 APEX motherboard. Also on display was a 4x 64GB DDR5-7000 setup running on an ASUS ROG Crosshair X870E Hero motherboard.
(Image credit: Future)
If you’d rather lean more into capacity than outright performance, it also loaded up eight 64GB R-DIMM DDR5-6600 CL42 modules for a total of 512GB with an ASUS Pro WS WRX90E-SAGE SE motherboard.