Thermaltake and Gigabyte
Thermaltake
Back in 2015, Thermaltake announced Smart Power Management (SPM), a service platform designed to track and analyse PC electricity consumption, with information accessible via the cloud using a PC or mobile app. Thermaltake wants to use SPM to help raise awareness among PC and DIY users about global warming and ultimately reduce CO2 emissions. Its latest Toughpower DPS G and Smart DPS G PSUs support the functionality, allowing users to assess the environmental friendliness of their systems, monitor energy usage and receive fan failure and voltage irregularity alerts. Users can also implement energy saving plans to set a wattage consumption goal for certain time periods.
The company's gaming brand, Tt eSPORTS, has also been working on a series of smart peripherals. The Theron Plus+ Smart Mouse, for example, can sync to your mobile device via Bluetooth to record your usage and performance stats and ultimately share them on the Tt eSPORTS Community and Data Management Platform to compare with friends and pro players. Similar functionality was also given to the Poseidon Z Plus+ Smart Keyboard, while the Poseidon Z Touch introduced the world to the company's SmartBar technology. This adds a touch-sensitive input area onto the spacebar, and you can touch and swipe various zones and program the functionality of these so you can do more without lifting your hand from the keyboard.
Gigabyte
Gigabyte's core focus was on the gaming industry and its own gaming laptop design, which manifests in both Gigabyte and Aorus products.
Virtual reality (VR) is a topic on everyone's lips now, including Gigabyte's. The company has already begun producing notebooks with VR capabilities, such as the high-end Aorus X7 DT which houses a full desktop-class GTX 980 GPU but weighs just 3.2kg.
Game-streaming is another hot topic, with more and more people tuning in to watch their favourite pro players at competitions or even just their favourite streamers – With 45 million unique daily users, Twitch has risen to become the number two video website in the world, with only YouTube ahead. Gigabyte ties into this as it is now implementing a portable version of AverMedia's hardware live stream engine in Aorus laptops such as the X3. By offloading parts of the recording/streaming workload to dedicated hardware, there's less impact on gaming frame rates.
As for Gigabyte laptops, we saw the Aero 14, a 19.9mm thick, 1.9kg laptop claimed to be the most potable GTX 970M notebook available, even with its 94Whr battery giving it up to 12 hours battery life. It has an all-metal casing with Nano-Imprint-Lithography Technology to add colour and a 3D carbon texture.