An early Christmas present from Taipei’s Guanghua computer market

There were no signs of any AI PC notebooks powered by the Intel Core Ultra processor, formerly known as Meteor Lake, when I went to Taipei’s Guanghua computer market yesterday to buy myself an early Christmas present.

Not that I was looking for one because I was searching for a much bigger beast in the form of my first desktop PC for at least a decade so that I can have a machine at home with enough horsepower to handle high resolution video editing for a project I’m planning next year.

While all the major PC brands have stores at the Guanghua market, I was looking for more configuration flexibility than they usually offer and checked out a few white box assembly shops on the second floor. Choosing a shop to work with was no easy matter given that they all look pretty much the same. In the end, I settled on the one pictured here because the sales guy knew his stuff when I pummelled him with questions about which CPU, GPU, and power supply I should buy.

He put together a list of best-of-class components on the screen, bringing up some benchmarks when I asked about relative CPU and GPU performance for video editing. Once I had settled on the configuration, he brought out all the components for me to make sure everything was in order. When the PC was delivered to my home a couple of hours later, it only took me a few minutes to get it up and running. Talk about a seamless customer experience!

Apart from the Intel i7 processor, the system is comprised of components from a veritable who’s who of Taiwan tech companies. The Nvidia RTX4070 GPU was manufactured by TSMC with the video card coming from MSI, the motherboard from Gigabyte, the DDR5 DRAM from Kingston, the case from Lian Li, the liquid cooler from Asus, and the 850-watt power supply from ADATA. Quite a testament to the enduring strength of Taiwan’s hi-tech ecosystem!

Now that I have my new system, the next step is figuring out which software applications to use on it. Not so long ago, Adobe would have been the default choice for video and graphics tasks but given the emergence of generative AI services like Runway, Midjourney, and ChatGPT DALL-E, I am not sure whether I really need it and longer. Evaluating my options should certainly keep me occupied over the holidays.