Computex 2026 Live: The biggest PC gaming hardware announcements at this year's show

Booo, no hairy fan—but this thermal pad has some seriously cool tech

All of us on the PC Gamer hardware team were left scratching our heads last week, after Noctua teased an image that looked suspiciously like it was launching a hairy fan.

But alas, it turns out it's just the NT-CP1 AM5/4 carbon nanotube CPU cooling pad. Actually, what am I talking about, that's pretty freaking sweet. And get this—Noctua and Carbice (the former is exclusively distributing the latter's thermal pad offerings) say it actually improves in thermal performance as time goes on.

"While thermal pastes and most other thermal pads gradually lose performance over time due to pump-out, delamination, cracking, and other degradation, the performance of Carbice pads continues to improve over hundreds and thousands of thermal cycles," says the press release.

Awesome. I mean, not as awesome as a brushy fan in your PC, but still. Anything carbon nanotube-based gets instant cool points. See what I did there?

The Ryzen 7 7700X3D looks like my kinda gaming processor, as AM5 sticks around for the long haul

AMD's current-gen CPU socket looks to be sticking with us for some time to come, as the company has extended its AM5 platform commitment until 2029. As Zen 6 processors are expected to appear either later this year or at some point in 2027, it's possible that even Zen 7 chips (if naming schemes hold) will be supported by the current socket.

Speaking of new chips, the red team has also announced a new CPU offering: the $329, AM5-based Ryzen 7 7700X3D. The launch comes alongside the re-release of the Ryzen 7 5800X3D as part of AM4's 10-year anniversary celebrations.

I run a regular Ryzen 7 7700X, and I've often wished it had a dose of 3D V-Cache for some extra gaming performance. Not that it's slow, mind, but some extra stacked cache can be pretty magic stuff for gaming. I'll be putting my hand firmly up to test one of those, don't you worry.

AMD has also announced an upcoming upgrade to its EXPO memory overclocking system, EXPO ULL. That's EXPO Ultra Low Latency to give it its full title, which the company claims can delivery an "additional 4% FPS (on avg) vs non-ULL EXPO memory."

Which, as our Nick points out in the article above, is probably pretty resolution and graphics settings specific, as DRAM speed isn't usually the biggest bottleneck in gaming systems. Hey, upgrades are upgrades—and AM5 looks to be in it for the long haul.

Hey look, an AMD graphics card

While proper next-gen graphics cards are a ways off yet, there's still some new GPU news in the form of the RX 9070 GRE. The previously-China-only card will now be available to the rest of the world with an MSRP of $549. That's the same original price as the RX 9070, but graphics card pricing being what it is, it's soared ever higher since launch.

The RX 9070 GRE has 48 compute units, as opposed to the 56 in the RX 9070 proper, and slightly lower ray accelerator and AI accelerator counts, too. Still, it's beefy enough to provide a decent whack of gaming grunt for a fairly reasonable sum.

Our Dave has already tested the RX 9070 GRE, and found it pretty good. As for the value proposition, though? That all depends on whether that price holds against the RX 9070 itself, and whether the delta becomes bigger between the two. Recommending GPUs is difficult right now, y'know?

And now for something completely different...

Would you like a holographic dragon in an over-sized test tube mounted to the front of your gaming PC?

No, I'm not sure either. But MSI has unveiled the MEG Vision X2 AI with a "first-of-it's kind AI Holostage", featuring the company's mascot, Lucky the dragon, as an AI avatar.

Yep, it's not subtle. Still, the press release suggests that a choice of digital companions will be available in future, and the "LuckyClaw" avatar will be available to respond to natural speech commands to help you tune your rig.

I'm really not sure how to feel about AI cyber prisons attached to the front of our machines (or on our desks), but perhaps we're looking at the future. Or, an experiment that makes for a booth-friendly showcase of MSI's burgeoning AI tech.

Still, Computex is known for wild PC case designs, and this one's certainly that.

Intel Arc G-Series Panther Lake handheld chips

Let's not forget we had one of the biggest announcements of this year's show... err, last week. Well, sort of. Intel's Arc G-Series chips for handheld gaming PCs have been long teased, but the blue team took the official wraps off well in advance of the show. Hey, getting in first counts for something, I guess?

Two chips were announced, the Intel Arc G3 and the Intel Arc G3 Extreme. They feature "up to Intel Arc B390 graphics", two P-cores, eight E-cores, and four LPE cores. That's a pretty good combination on paper for a handheld chip, particularly as Intel's Panther Lake laptop chips have already proven their gaming prowess.

Our Dave has already got his hands on the MSI Claw 8 EX AI+, one of the first handhelds to use the G3 Extreme, and I think it's fair to say he's rather impressed:

"The device in my hands feels like the standard all new handheld gaming PCs will be judged by"

Dave loves a handheld and he's tested the very best around, so that headline's got me all sorts of curious to test one for myself. The bad news? The price has been mooted as around $1,500.

Sigh. I loved my time with the previous MSI Claw 8 AI+ A2VM, and this new model should make mincemeat of its impressive-for-the-time performance figures. A grand and a half, though? That's some serious moolah, and the same sort of money as some mid-range gaming laptop deals. We thought the Asus ROG Xbox Ally X was expensive, but this? It's proper money, so it'd better be proper good.

Still, if those first impressions hold up, we could be looking at the new king of our best handheld gaming PC guide. That being said, it looks like there'll be plenty of handhelds featuring the chip at this year's show, so the MSI beastie has some competition straight out the gate. Stay tuned here to see what we make of the rest, as the show goes on.

Nvidia RTX Spark

The biggest news so far is Nvidia's announcement of the RTX Spark SoC, which makes use of an Arm-based N1X "superchip" with up to 20 Grace CPU cores and 6188 RTX Blackwell GPU cores.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang took to the stage to hold up two RTX Spark-equipped laptops running games, as the GPU core count is equivalent to an RTX 5070. In terms of gaming performance, though, it might be better to think of it as "RTX 5070-like", as emulation may well take its toll on the frame rate depending on the game/implementation.

We'll have to play with one ourselves to find out, of course, but the new SoC won't just be for laptops. There are also said to be Spark-equipped mini PCs and desktops on the way, which marks something of a brave new frontier for Nvidia in the hardware space.

Still, it's the laptop potential that really has us excited here at PC Gamer Towers. Particularly if Nvidia's claims of gaming battery life "better than anything you've seen before on RTX laptops" hold up in practice.

Many questions remain, though. For a start, these systems can support up to 128 GB of RAM, which will be mighty expensive in these RAMpocalypse-influenced times. Will we see reasonably-priced 16 GB or 32 GB offerings? And will the emulation prove to be an issue, or will Nvidia's technical know-how smooth over some of the rougher Arm-based waters, especially as it's working with devs to create Arm-native games?

It's all still to play for. Still, a brand new Nvidia hardware release, with actual gaming potential rather than pure AI chops? Yep, you should pay attention to this one very closely—especially as it gives us a better idea of when to expect next-gen RTX GPUs.

Hello and welcome to our Computex 2026 live blog! You'll find all the latest PC gaming announcements from this year's show on this very page. Bear with me a second, because there's a whole lot to cover, so let's get you caught up...