The Best of Computex 2023

pcmag.com:

To be sure, at Computex 2023 in Taipei, Taiwan, the AI wave was inescapable, with Arm, Intel, and Nvidia showing off and talking up new advancements in local and cloud hardware AI acceleration during the event. In fact, Nvidia’s AI showing at Computex helped briefly drive the company past a $1 trillion market valuation(Opens in a new window).

AI—the hype, the dread, and the head-scratching about it in equal measure—dominated conversations throughout the show. But what also pervaded the 2023 Computex? A sense of excitement, gratitude, and optimism among attendees. This was the first "all-out" international version of the show since the pandemic began, and it was hopping. Computers, new display gear, PC DIY gear galore, and much more: We found plenty of products worth calling out, making picking our annual best-in-show a bit tricky. Vendors like Acer, Asus, Gigabyte, and MSI brought genuinely interesting, always thoughtful, and sometimes powerful hardware developments to the biggest pure computing event of the year. Come to Taipei with us and dig in: Here are the best accessories, components, and systems that we saw.

The sheer showing of new laptops at Computex 2023 was lighter than usual—we're between Intel mobile CPU generations, with "Meteor Lake" 14th Gen coming later this year, and AMD's Ryzen 7000 chips just revving up. MSI took that opportunity to seize the spotlight, with an interesting innovation on the classic laptop touchpad in one of its Raider gaming laptops. Similar to what Asus has done with its light-up LED touchpads that double as numpads, MSI has brought a touch-sensitive LED surface to its MSI Raider GR78 HX Smart Touchpad edition—only this time it’s much larger, it’s expandable, and it’s complete with