The Best (and Most Interesting) Tech I Saw at Computex 2026

Computex has a way of blurring together after a few days. You walk so many halls that the booths start to look the same, the demos blend into one another, and your feet remind you that you've been standing on concrete since breakfast. But every year, there's a handful of things that cut through all of that. This year in Taipei, there was more of it than usual.

That's largely because 2026 wasn't a normal hardware year. Despite the ongoing RAM and storage crisis, there were some interesting innovations.

NVIDIA and MediaTek turned up and quietly rewrote what a PC is even supposed to be. ROG celebrated its 20th birthday with the kind of excess only ROG can get away with. Intel walked into the handheld space and made it exciting again after a couple of genuinely stale years. And somewhere between the AI keynotes and the transformer-sized power supplies, I kept finding myself grinning at a booth like a kid.

So after walking the floor until my legs gave out, here's what actually stayed with me, category by category. These are the products I'd happily make room for on my own desk, or in my own bag.

Best Announcement of Computex 2026: NVIDIA RTX Spark

If you only remember one thing from this year's show, make it this one. The RTX Spark was the moment everyone was talking about, and for good reason. It's NVIDIA's first real swing at a consumer Windows PC chip, and it's an Arm-based design built in close collaboration with MediaTek, who handled the CPU side of things. So this is two of the biggest names in silicon putting their heads together, and the result is genuinely hard to wrap your head around at first.

NVIDIA pairs that 20-core Grace CPU with its own Blackwell RTX graphics that has 6,144 CUDA Cores, which is the same as the RTX 5070 card. The two stitched together over an NVLink-C2C interconnect that drags a slice of datacentre tech down into a laptop.

The story is what all of that lets you do. You can sit down and play AAA games with ray tracing switched on, with no dedicated GPU anywhere in the machine. NVIDIA showed Adobe Premiere Pro and Photoshop running on optimised versions built for it. And because the thing is so absurdly specced, it's a serious option for running local LLMs right on your own hardware, which puts it squarely up against the Mac minis and MacBooks that have owned that conversation until now.

Most Exciting Gaming Laptop of Computex 2026: ASUS ROG Strix Scar 18

Every Computex has one laptop that ruins your budget just by existing, and this year it was the Strix Scar 18.

ASUS is calling it the most powerful machine it has ever built, and the spec that backs that up isn't the RTX 5090 inside, which carries over from last year, but the way ASUS feeds it. The Scar 18 pushes 320W of total system power, split as 145W to the Intel Core Ultra 9 290HX Plus and 175W to the RTX 5090 laptop GPU

To handle all that heat, ASUS rebuilt the cooling around a larger vapour chamber and a rear-focused exhaust. There's a gorgeous 18-inch 4K Mini LED panel up top, up to 128GB of DDR5 RAM.

Best NUC for Gaming: ROG NUC 16 Edition 20

I stood in front of this thing for a good minute just trying to accept what was inside it. An RTX 5090 and an Intel Core Ultra 9 290HX+, the kind of hardware I'd expect to lug around in a flagship gaming laptop, packed into a box I could comfortably hold in one hand. The NUC 16 plays Pragmata quite smoothly without the chassis getting ready for a liftoff.

There's 32GB of RAM and 2TB of storage in there too, and ROG hasn't skimped on the ports either, with a generous spread across the front and back, so going this small doesn't mean fighting for places to plug things in. If you've ever looked at a full-size rig and wished it didn't eat half your room, the NUC 16 Edition 20 is ROG quietly proving it doesn't have to.

Best Budget Laptop: Dell XPS 13

Dell pulled some genuinely cool stuff out at a closed-door briefing, and the XPS 13 was the one that made the most sense for regular buyers.

It runs Intel's new Wildcat Lake chipset, specifically the Core 5 320, and starts with 8GB of RAM and 512GB of storage. Dell is openly positioning it as a MacBook Neo competitor, and in a few places it actually edges ahead. The XPS 13 features a 13-inch 2.5K panel that has an anti-glare coating and is also a touch panel. Besides that, it also has a quad speaker, and while it also skips out on a fingerprint ID, there’s face ID.

It's not going to set benchmark records, and it isn't trying to. It's trying to be the sensible, premium-feeling Windows laptop for someone like a college-going student who just needs a good machine that does things well, and at that, it looks like it nails the brief.

Best Gaming Handheld: MSI Claw 8 EX AI+

This was the one that genuinely got me excited, because the handheld space has felt stuck for a while. MSI gave the Claw a proper rethink. The new design borrows heavily from the Xbox controllers, the same direction we saw on the ROG Xbox Ally, and it works. It’s much easier to hold, and the edges also have a textured grip.

The button layout feels right, and there are hall effect triggers and joysticks in there, which is exactly what you want for longevity. And this is something that the Acer Atlas 8 misses out on. The newly launched Forza Horizon 6 runs exceptionally well on Medium graphics, with Intel XeSS SR enabled. The game ran at around 56fps without any frame drops or lags.

The reason it performs the way it does is the chip sitting inside, which brings me neatly to the next category.

Best Gaming Silicon: Intel Arc G3 Extreme

For two years AMD has owned the handheld market, and every decent device ran on some flavour of Ryzen Z2. So the most consequential thing I saw at Computex wasn't a finished product at all, it was the chip turning up inside several of them.

The Arc G3 Extreme is Intel's first silicon built specifically for handhelds. It’s essentially the Panther Lake chip running the B390 iGPU on the Extreme and the B370 on the base Arc G3. The former is the same iGPU I have previously tested on the Samsung Galaxy Book 6 Pro and Dell XPS 14, both of which ran on the Intel Core Ultra X7 358H.

As of now, three new handhelds have been showcased with the Arc G3 series — the MSI Claw 8 EX AI+, Acer Predator Atlas 8, and the OneXPlayer 3.

Interesting Gaming Monitor of Computex 2026: MSI MPG OLED 322URDX36

Every Computex throws up one display that makes you stop walking, and for me this year it was the MSI MPG OLED 322URDX36.

On paper, it's a 31.5-inch 4K QD-OLED, which would already be plenty, but MSI has done something genuinely clever with it. It's the world's first 31.5-inch triple-mode gaming monitor, which means you get three native configurations baked into one panel: 4K at 360Hz, 1440p at 520Hz, and 1080p at 680Hz, and you switch between them depending on what you're playing. The idea is that you sit in 4K mode for the slower, prettier single-player stuff, then drop down to 1080p when you want those absurd refresh rates for a competitive shooter like Counter Strike 2, Valorant, or Apex Legends.

Under the surface it's running a 5th-gen QD-OLED panel with Penta Tandem technology, and an RGB Stripe sub-pixel layout that cuts down on the colour fringing and fuzzy text that OLED monitors have always struggled with. The brightness peaks at 1500 nits, and you get a DisplayPort 2.1a and a USB-C port pushing 98W of power delivery, so it'll happily charge a laptop while keeping your desk tidy.

Best Curved Gaming Monitor: Dell Alienware AW3926QW

I lost a good chunk of my schedule to this one. The Dell Alienware AW3926QW 39-inch 5K RGB Stripe curved tandem OLED. It’s a 1500R curvature and wraps around you just enough that the edges of the panel sit in your peripheral vision. It’s an exceptional panel with great viewing angles. Resident Evil Requiem was super fun on this, especially the darker scenes with the not-so-fun jump scares.

It runs at 5K and 165Hz for immersion in single-player games. But, if you're playing something like CS or Valorant, you can drop the resolution to 1080p and push it all the way to 330Hz. You can also change the size of the display to either 27-inch or 25-inch in the eSports mode.

It's a dream display for anyone building a serious gaming space, the sort of centerpiece you build the rest of the desk around rather than the other way round.