A roundup of the most interesting PC hardware announced at Gamescom 2024 from the likes of Asus, Zotac, Ckrd and HyperX.
Gamescom 2024 is officially underway in Cologne – and alongside a raft of game announcements at Opening Night Live, a lot of new PC hardware has also been shown off for the first time.
Here are my personal highlights from the show so far, including next-gen AMD Ryzen motherboards, a promising new PC handheld, big news in the gaming monitor space and a host of special edition hardware to celebrate the meteoric launch of Black Myth: Wukong.
Take your pick from the six headlines below, or scroll on!
As you may recall, we tested out the confusingly subpar Ryzen 9000 lineup on the same 2022-era X670E motherboards that accompanied Ryzen 7000. A couple of weeks later, new X870E and X870 motherboards are finally ready, with Asus debuting eight X870E and X870 models at Gamescom – seven ATX and one ITX.
Like other AMD 800-series chipset models that have broken cover since Computex this year, they include niceties like WiFi 7 and USB 4, but Asus is looking to differentiate them with features like a higher-res UEFI, optimised « NitroPath » DDR5 RAM slots and latchless PCIe slots for graphics cards. There are also a host of « AI » features for overclocking, cooling and networking, the vast majority of which don’t seem to use artifical intelligence in the traditional sense of the word, so we’ll skip them for now.
Thankfully, the non-AI features are pretty exciting. I’m particularly looking forward to trying the new UEFI shipping on these motherboards, which can show a live readout of all connected components on a diagram – with details made clearer by a higher resolution interface. You can jump immediately from this diagram to relevant settings for a connected device that you select; eg to the fan settings when looking at a connected fan header.
The top two motherboards in the lineup, the X870E Hero and the Strix X870E-E Gaming WiFi, get DDR5 design optimisations under the « NitroPath » brand, including gold finger pins, shorter signal pathways and stronger retention mechanisms. Asus claims that this can allow for 400MT/s higher RAM speeds than their traditional designs, which could be nice for anyone going beyond the usual 6000MT/s sweet spot. All X870E/X870 motherboards include JEDEC support up to DDR5-5600 and real-time memory overclocking in Ryzen Master, so RAM tinkering could be quite fruitful.
Finally, some motherboards have « Q-Release Slim » PCIe 5.0 slots, which allow graphics cards to be locked into place during normal use but easily removed with a specific movement, without needing to manually unlatch the slot or even press a button as we saw on Asus’ original Q-Release PCIe slots. This is the first thing I’ll test on the new motherboards, which ship in September.
Zotac is getting into the popular PC handheld game, joining the likes of Asus, Lenovo and MSI. Their Windows 11 handheld is called the Zone, and it comes with a Ryzen 8840U chipset, 1080p 120Hz OLED (!) display and a $799 price tag.
