Tag Archives: Laptops

ASUS ProArt Just Closed the Gap Between a Laptop and a Workstation

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Creative professionals have been carrying a compromise for years. The laptop powerful enough for serious work tends to be too heavy or too loud, and the one thin and light enough for a day bag can’t handle the work. Purpose-built workstations solve the performance side but solve nothing about portability. The gap between the two has been a persistent frustration, not a deliberate choice most people would make.

ASUS is addressing that directly at Computex 2026, where the ProArt P16, ProArt P14, and ProArt Mini PC were unveiled as the first ASUS devices powered by NVIDIA’s RTX Spark superchip. The same ARM-based chip combining a 20-core Grace CPU with a Blackwell RTX GPU and up to 128GB of unified memory runs across all three products, making the performance difference between a laptop and a desktop largely a matter of form factor rather than capability.

Designer: ASUS

The ProArt P16 and P14 are the portable entries, and they arrive 13% thinner and 16% lighter than the previous P16 generation. The P16 weighs 1.77kg at 12.9mm, and the P14 comes in at 1.48kg and 13.9mm. Both are CNC-manufactured in Nano Black and Neo White finishes, and carry 99.9Wh batteries for all-day runtime, a detail that matters when the work is intensive enough to drain power quickly. The machines don’t sacrifice weight for performance or performance for weight.

The display on both laptops is ASUS Lumina Pro OLED, calibrated to Delta E < 1 color accuracy, Pantone Validated, and certified for VESA DisplayHDR True Black 1000. Peak HDR brightness reaches 1,600 nits, which is more than three times what the previous ProArt generation could manage. A 120Hz variable refresh rate, 0.2ms response time, and an anti-reflection coating that cuts glare by 65% complete a panel that keeps color decisions accurate regardless of the lighting conditions a shoot or edit session happens to land in.

Under the hood, RTX Spark’s 1 petaflop of AI compute and unified memory pool change what locally processed work looks like. Rendering a 90GB-plus 3D scene, editing 12K 4:2:2 video, generating 4K AI video, or running a 120-billion-parameter language model locally are tasks that previously needed significantly bigger machines. Adobe is rebuilding Photoshop and Premiere specifically for RTX Spark to deliver 2x faster AI and graphics performance, and a three-month Creative Cloud subscription ships with the ProArt laptops.

The ProArt Mini PC extends the same logic to the desk. At 150 × 150 × 51mm, it fits anywhere a small speaker would and carries up to 128GB of unified memory, 10GbE wired networking, M.2 PCIe Gen 5 expansion, and up to 140W of thermal headroom for sustained demanding workloads. A single RTX Spark-powered box of that size, running AI renders or local large language models around the clock, is a genuinely different proposition for a small studio or home setup than what was available previously.

All three products sit within a broader ASUS ProArt ecosystem that integrates displays, peripherals, creator apps, and AI workflow software into a connected end-to-end experience. ProArt P16, P14, and Mini PC are expected to be available in fall 2026 in select regions, with additional configurations announced closer to launch.

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The Surface Laptop Ultra Just Got NVIDIA’s Answer to Apple Silicon

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The laptop has always been a machine of compromises. Workstation-class performance typically arrived in thick chassis with short battery life and fan noise audible from across a room. Getting genuine power in a form factor thin and light enough to carry without a second thought has been largely Apple’s territory, a problem it’s been solving with its own ARM-based chips while Windows machines played catch-up.

NVIDIA is changing that calculus for Windows with RTX Spark, an ARM-based superchip that fuses a 20-core Grace CPU with a Blackwell RTX GPU carrying 6,144 CUDA cores, connected by NVIDIA’s NVLink-C2C chip-to-chip interconnect. Microsoft built the Surface Laptop Ultra around it from the silicon up, designing the machine and the chip in concert, producing what it describes as the most powerful Surface Laptop ever built.

Designer: Microsoft, NVIDIA

The reason ARM architecture matters for laptop design is power efficiency. Compared to x86 chips, ARM-based designs deliver significantly more performance per watt, and that ratio determines what’s physically possible in a chassis. RTX Spark laptops are engineered to be as slim as 14mm and as light as 3 pounds, proportions that previously excluded any serious dedicated GPU from the equation entirely.

The Surface Laptop Ultra lands at under 18mm thick and under 4.5 pounds, housed in CNC-machined aluminum in Platinum and Nightfall finishes. The 15-inch mini-LED PixelSense Ultra touchscreen reaches up to 2,000 nits of peak HDR brightness with a 3:2 aspect ratio and 262 pixels per inch, making it the brightest display Microsoft has ever shipped on a Surface. A full port set, including HDMI, USB-C, USB-A, SD card, and headphone jack, rounds out a machine designed for professional use.

RTX Spark’s most defining architectural choice is unified memory, where up to 128GB of RAM is shared dynamically between the CPU and GPU. A 3D rendering job, a video edit, and a locally running AI model can all draw from that same pool simultaneously, without the bottlenecks discrete memory architectures create. That arrangement enables 1 petaflop of AI compute, enough to run 120-billion-parameter models entirely on the device.

The full CUDA software stack runs natively on RTX Spark, which matters directly for creative professionals. Adobe is rebuilding Photoshop and Premiere from the ground up for the chip, targeting 2x faster AI and graphics performance. On the creative side, RTX Spark handles 12K video editing, renders 90GB-plus 3D scenes using NVIDIA OptiX, and generates 4K AI video, tasks that previously required a dedicated workstation to complete without serious compromise.

NVIDIA describes RTX Spark as the most efficient PC chip ever built, a statement aimed squarely at Apple Silicon’s grip on the high-end creative laptop market. That efficiency is also what allows the Surface Laptop Ultra’s all-new thermal system to sustain heavy workloads without the throttling and fan noise that defined previous Windows machines in this tier. Microsoft’s own engineers worked across mechanical, thermal, materials, and industrial design disciplines simultaneously, treating the chassis and the chip as a single system.

All-day battery life holds even while running on battery power, and the compact charger is small enough to fit in a jacket pocket. The Surface Laptop Ultra and additional RTX Spark-powered devices from ASUS, Dell, HP, Lenovo, and MSI are expected in fall 2026. For a platform that has long asked users to choose between portability and capability, the arrival of an ARM PC chip in NVIDIA’s hands changes the terms of that conversation considerably.

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The $4,499 ASUS Gaming Laptop With Two Full Screens Will Make You Question Every Laptop You’ve Owned

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Dual-screen laptops have been ASUS’s long game. The Zenbook Duo spent several years proving that two displays could coexist for productivity users before the form factor felt genuinely mature. The ROG Zephyrus Duo carried that logic into gaming territory, though the 2022 original hedged its bets with a half-sized secondary panel perched above the keyboard. The 2026 GX651, which first appeared at CES earlier this year and got its US pricing confirmed at Computex this week, drops the hedge completely. Two full 16-inch OLED panels, same resolution, same refresh rate, same brightness ceiling.

The base configuration opens at $4,499, and the Computex backdrop gives that number useful framing. Nvidia and Microsoft were teasing ARM-based laptop chips a few booths over, and the rest of the gaming hall was running its annual RTX refresh cycle. None of that noise touched the Duo’s story, because its headline was a chassis decision rather than a silicon one. After six years and three generations, ASUS finally has a dual-screen gaming laptop that leads with the screens and lets everything else follow.

Brand: ASUS ROG

Dual-screen laptop on a showroom table; main keyboard visible and purple-pattern display on the lower screen, upper screen showing software UI.

Matching the displays across both panels is the design decision that signals intent. Both screens deliver 3K resolution at 2880 x 1800 pixels, both run at 120Hz with variable refresh rate support, and both hit 1,100 nits peak brightness in HDR with full DCI-P3 color coverage. The top panel gets G-Sync compatibility because it handles gaming duties, but the bottom screen doesn’t get downgraded to compensate. Previous Zephyrus Duo models gave you a flagship display up top and a secondary utility screen below, a hierarchy that made sense when the bottom panel was physically smaller. The GX651 treats parity as the baseline, which changes the relationship between the two surfaces entirely. One screen runs your game, the other runs Discord, Spotify, streaming software, browser tabs, whatever parallel workflow gaming actually requires in 2026.

The keyboard detaches completely and connects over Bluetooth when separated from the chassis, continuing the design language ASUS refined with the Zenbook Duo line over the past few years. Magnets hold it in place when docked, covering the lower display for traditional laptop mode, but the machine was engineered to run with both screens exposed. Pull the keyboard free and set it wherever makes ergonomic sense, angled on a stand or flat on the desk beside the laptop itself. The trackpad lives on the keyboard folio, so input travel is part of the design assumption. ASUS isn’t treating detachment as a party trick or an edge case. The entire thermal layout, the hinge mechanism, and the port placement assume you will use this machine with the keyboard removed.

Two-in-one laptop set in tent mode on a display table, screen glowing purple.

The silicon inside follows the screen-first brief rather than leading it. The base $4,499 configuration ships with an RTX 5070 Ti, while the top-end model pushes into RTX 5090 territory at a price ASUS hasn’t officially published yet but Gizmodo clocks at $5,500. Intel’s Panther Lake CPUs handle the processor side, with options ranging across the Core Ultra X series depending on configuration. All of that is competitive hardware in mid-2026 terms, but the specs themselves are table stakes. What matters is how ASUS packaged them. The cooling system has to manage thermals across a chassis that expects both displays to be running simultaneously under load, and the hinge assembly has to support the weight and structural integrity of two full glass OLED panels without compromising rigidity. Those are the engineering problems that define this product, and the GPU choice is downstream of solving them.

Open dual-screen laptop on a showroom table with purple backlit keyboard and a blue neon screen display on the main panel.

ASUS confirmed US availability at Computex after showing the hardware at CES in January, which means the company spent the better part of six months watching feedback, finalizing logistics, and preparing the supply chain for a machine that doesn’t fit neatly into any existing SKU category. At $4,499 the Zephyrus Duo GX651 costs meaningfully more than a conventional gaming laptop with identical silicon, and the delta is purely the dual-screen chassis. That premium is either justified or deal-breaking depending on whether you’ve spent the last several years wishing your gaming laptop had room for a second panel. ASUS is betting that enough buyers have been waiting for exactly this. Computex 2026 will be remembered for Nvidia’s ARM tease and the RTX 5090 mobile flood, but the Zephyrus Duo is the machine that asked a different question entirely and shipped with an answer.

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Acer’s Nitro Blaze Link Is a Gaming Handheld That Skips the Processor

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Gaming PCs have fractured into more categories than any single device can cover. The player who needs maximum frame rates for competitive play sits on one end, the person who just wants to game from the couch without moving their rig sits on the other, and every setup in between has its own distinct demands. Most gaming hardware picks a side and leaves the rest unaddressed.

At Computex 2026, Acer addressed nearly the whole range at once with five new products. The lineup runs from the iF Design Award-winning Predator Helios 18 AI at the performance ceiling, through the Nitro 16 and the Nitro Blaze Link streaming handheld, and rounds out with the Predator Aethon 750 TKL keyboard and the Predator Robust Plus Backpack for getting all of it from place to place.

Designer: Acer

The Predator Helios 18 AI is where Acer went all out. Powered by an Intel Core Ultra 9 290HX Plus processor and up to an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090 Laptop GPU with 24GB of GDDR7 VRAM, it’s configurable with as much as 256GB of DDR5 memory and 6TB of storage spread across three PCIe Gen 5 NVMe slots. For a laptop, that’s a desktop workstation argument.

The 18-inch Mini LED display switches between 4K at 120Hz and Full HD at 240Hz through Acer’s Dual-Mode Display system. It reaches 1,000 nits in HDR mode and delivers Calman Verified color accuracy at 100% DCI-P3 coverage with NVIDIA G-SYNC. For a long competitive session or an extended run through an open-world RPG, the panel is built to match whichever demand comes first.

Keeping those specs from throttling requires hardware to match. Dual 6th Gen Predator AeroBlade 3D Fans each pack 100 metal blades at just 0.05mm, delivering a claimed 20% increase in airflow over plastic fans, supported by liquid metal thermal grease and vector heat pipes. Six speakers with Predator Vox technology handle audio, while Intel Killer DoubleShot Pro combines Wi-Fi 7 and Ethernet to keep online play stable.

The Acer Nitro 16 doesn’t reach the Helios’s ceiling, but it earns its own headline. It’s the first Acer gaming laptop to feature the AMD Ryzen 9 9955HX3D processor, using 2nd Gen AMD 3D V-Cache technology to stay competitive even when unplugged. Paired with up to an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5070 Ti Laptop GPU carrying 12GB of GDDR7 VRAM, it covers most of what serious gaming demands.

The 16-inch WQXGA panel runs at up to 240Hz with a 3ms response time and 100% DCI-P3 coverage, backed by G-SYNC. A dual-fan, quad-intake, quad-exhaust cooling system with vector heat pipes keeps thermals in check. At 2.5kg with a 92 Wh battery, USB 4 connectivity, and Wi-Fi 6E, it’s a more practical travel machine than most competing laptops in its performance class.

The Nitro Blaze Link puts a twist on the gaming handheld design and skips local processing entirely, opting to stream games wirelessly from a connected PC over Wi-Fi 6 via Sunshine and Moonlight services. It pairs naturally with the Helios 18 AI or Nitro 16, letting someone else in the household play from the couch while the main machine stays occupied elsewhere. The 7-inch WUXGA touchscreen and full controller layout handle the experience at a light 464 g.

The Predator Aethon 750 TKL keeps the desk focused with a Tenkeyless layout that removes the number pad and anything non-essential for gaming. Custom Predator magnetic switches support WASD Rapid Trigger, Global Actuation, and Fine Actuation modes, while an 8,000 Hz polling rate and N-key rollover keep every input registering cleanly. Wired, 2.4 GHz wireless, and Bluetooth connections add flexibility for different setups.

The Predator Robust Plus Backpack handles transport, expanding from 25L to 32.5L with a padded compartment for laptops up to 18 inches and a charging cable pass-through for keeping devices topped up on the move. A waterproof inner section and compression compartment round it out. The backpack arrives in North America in Q3 2026 at $199; the Aethon 750 TKL launches in EMEA in Q4 at €149.

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Acer’s Aspire Go 15 Is the First Budget Laptop Built on Snapdragon C

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Qualcomm’s Snapdragon processors have spent the past couple of years proving themselves in premium laptops, winning over skeptics with extended battery life and capable on-device AI. The architecture has benefited from that validation, but it has largely stayed in the upper tiers of the market, leaving mainstream buyers without access to the same platform. That split is exactly what Acer is addressing at Computex 2026.

The company announced two laptops at opposite ends of the price range: the Swift Spin 14 AI, a premium convertible running on Snapdragon X2 Series processors, and the Aspire Go 15, which holds a distinction of its own as the first laptop ever announced with Qualcomm’s new Snapdragon C processor. Together, they cover more of the market with ARM-based computing than any single product could manage alone.

Designer: Acer

The Swift Spin 14 AI carries up to a Snapdragon X2 Elite processor paired with an 80 TOPS NPU, qualifying it as a Copilot+ PC with full on-device AI support. The 14-inch WUXGA IPS display runs at 120Hz and handles touch input alongside the included Acer Active Stylus 420, which uses Wacom AES 2.0 technology with 4,096 pressure levels and tilt detection for natural pen-on-screen writing and annotation.

The 360-degree hinge lets it shift between laptop, presentation stand, and flat tablet without swapping accessories. Weighing just 1.34 kg and measuring 15.9–16.5 mm thin, it fits in a small bag without much thought. The cobalt blue aluminum chassis is MIL-STD-810H certified, and the 65Wh battery is advertised to last up to 23 hours under video playback, with a 100W USB4 Type-C fast-charging option for quick power-ups between sessions.

The stylus parks in an onboard garage and charges for 100 minutes of use in just 30 seconds. The laptop connects via Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 6.0, and the port lineup covers dual USB4 Type-C, dual USB 3.2 Type-A, and HDMI 2.1. Three microphones with Acer PurifiedVoice AI noise cancellation keep calls clear, while the 5 MP IR camera handles Windows Hello and automatic screen-lock for privacy.

The Aspire Go 15 carries a different kind of significance. Acer is the first PC maker to announce a laptop powered by Qualcomm’s Snapdragon C processor, a platform aimed squarely at the entry-level market. The 15.6-inch Full HD display and straightforward clamshell design target users who want reliable daily performance for browsing, documents, and streaming without the overhead or cost of a premium machine.

Acer also built post-consumer recycled plastic into the back cover and power adapter, packaged the whole thing in 100% recyclable materials, and earned both Energy Star certification and EPEAT registration. Wi-Fi 6E, dual full-function USB Type-C, and a 53Wh battery are positioned for all-day unplugged use. AcerSense manages battery and app settings, and the programmable Acer My Key provides one-press access to frequently used tools.

The Swift Spin 14 AI reaches EMEA in July 2026, North America in August, and Australia in Q3. The Aspire Go 15’s availability window hasn’t been confirmed yet, and neither laptop carries an announced price. Taken together, they mark a significant expansion in how broadly Qualcomm Snapdragon-based Windows computing now reaches, from someone signing contracts on a cobalt blue convertible to a student getting through the day on a tight budget.

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