Akasa at Computex 2024: Hawking Series Cases, USB4 Enclosures, Power Accessories, Cooling Gear
Akasa brought an interesting set of new gear from its diverse portfolio of PC hardware to Computex 2024. The star attraction is the elegant Hawking series fanless case. The silver-aluminium variant is a work of art. The Hawking series is designed for ASUS NUC motherboards with 28-35 W Core i3 chips. It features a solid copper baseplate to pull heat from the SoC, with a series of heat pipes pushing it to the body, which doubles up as an extruded aluminium heatsink. Akasa also showcased several smaller fanless cases under the Maze and Gem series, for Raspberry Pi 4.
Next up, Akasa showed us a couple of slick aluminium portable SSD enclosures that feature 40 Gbps USB4 connectivity. You simply install an M.2-2280 SSD, a bridge chip has a PCIe Gen 3 x4 connection for this drive on one end, and the 40 Gbps USB4 interface on the other. A single type-C cable is used for both power and host connectivity. Among the various connectivity accessories showcased was a 5 Gbps Ethernet NIC with CAT-6a, based on a Realtek controller.
Next up, Akasa showed us a couple of slick aluminium portable SSD enclosures that feature 40 Gbps USB4 connectivity. You simply install an M.2-2280 SSD, a bridge chip has a PCIe Gen 3 x4 connection for this drive on one end, and the 40 Gbps USB4 interface on the other. A single type-C cable is used for both power and host connectivity. Among the various connectivity accessories showcased was a 5 Gbps Ethernet NIC with CAT-6a, based on a Realtek controller.