A group of senior Asus staffers recently visited London to talk about their enormous portfolio of products. They sounded very bullish about 2018 so it was entirely appropriate they held their event at the Red Bull Gaming Sphere in Shoreditch. No doubt you will recognise most of the products in the photos from Computex 2018.
Admittedly the VivoWatch BP was new but healthcare products aren't really part of the KitGuru ambit. On the other hand we are always happy to talk to companies such as Asus about their plans and as we recently acknowledged, Asus ROG has a habit of making waves in the gaming industry so anything they have to say deserves a good deal of attention.
KitGuru managed to grab 15 minutes with four senior Asus people on camera.
Jackie Hsu, Corporate VP and Global Sales Head OPBG (Open Platform Business Group)
Albert Chang, Head of Motherboard Research and Development
Jonathan Chu, Section Manager, ROG Product Manager for Gaming Motherboards
Jon ‘Elmor' Sandstrom, Hardware R&D Engineer
Before we started the interview, Jackie Hsu told us that Asus has had a superb YTD (Year To Date) with sales that are up by ‘double digit percentages' (between 15 and 20 percent).
A chunk of this increase has come from the mining market which is clearly now in decline however Jackie Hsu was adamant that even when you strip out mining the increase is between 5 and 10 percent. He was, however keen to point out that Asus is not a greedy company.
“We only compete in two sectors” he told us, “Gaming and non-Gaming.”
And then it was time for the interview where we discuss a number of topics including:
- CPU socket compatibility.
- The vexing question of Intel using TIM under their heat spreaders.
- How many CPU cores a gamer should demand.
- The difficulty of guaranteeing your DDR4 memory will work with a new motherboard or CPU.
KitGuru says: We had a fascinating afternoon with Asus – let us know in the comment below which topics we should discuss the next time we sit down with a hardware company.