Tag Archives: desktops

TECNO and Tonino Lamborghini Built the Smallest Water-Cooled Gaming PC

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Tech collaborations with fashion and luxury brands usually follow a familiar, slightly tired script. A logo goes on the back of an otherwise unchanged device, a press release says something about “shared values,” and that’s more or less it. So when TECNO announced its partnership with Tonino Lamborghini at MWC 2026 in Barcelona, it was fair to be skeptical about what “Italian design meets cutting-edge technology” would actually look like in practice.

It turns out the answer involves water-cooling tubes, a 241-pixel LED matrix on the back of a phone, and a mini gaming PC that looks like it belongs on the set of a science fiction film. The collaboration goes beyond a branding exercise. It’s a full product line with a consistent visual language running across all of it.

Designer: TECNO x Tonino Lamborghini

The centerpiece is the Tonino Lamborghini TECNO TAURUS, officially the MEGA Mini G1 Pro, the follow-up to the MEGA Mini G1, which TECNO claimed as the world’s first and smallest water-cooled gaming PC. The TAURUS keeps that cooling system, building around a roughly 10,000 mm² pure copper cold plate and a triple-fan setup inside a gunmetal all-metal chassis.

Through the transparent side panel, you can see the red water-cooling tubes looping around the internals, glowing under orange-tinted fans. Rather than hiding the engineering, it’s deliberately flaunting it. A small status screen on the front body lets you monitor CPU and GPU performance in real time, without opening a separate dashboard on another screen.

The second launched product is the TECNO POVA Metal Tonino Lamborghini Limited Edition, which TECNO is calling the world’s first full-metal unibody 5G phone. The camera module takes a triangular form, housing the Lamborghini “L” badge at its center, sitting flush against an uninterrupted metal back with bezels down to 0.99 mm.

A vertical slot running down the body doubles as a pulse light strip. The rear also features a 241-pixel independent LED dot matrix that can display call alerts, notifications, and custom animations. It sounds like a gimmick, but it’s one of the few times a phone’s notification system has been treated as a surface design decision. The phone runs on a Snapdragon processor and comes in silver, matte black, and red colorways.

Beyond these two, TECNO showed a concept AIoT ecosystem extending the design language to laptops, tablets, and open-ear earphones, all carrying the same red-and-gunmetal palette and the Tonino Lamborghini shield badge. The laptops feature a sharp V-shaped crease across the lid, the tablets get red-ringed cameras, and the earphone case is angular enough to feel at home next to the rest of the lineup.

The real question this collaboration leaves open is whether the Tonino Lamborghini aesthetic, bold as it is, adds genuine character to these devices or just visual noise. Luxury branding on tech hardware has a long and uneven track record, and most of it ages poorly once the novelty fades. TECNO is betting the design has enough substance to outlast the MWC spotlight.

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The Vintage Apple Computer That Belongs on Every Tech Lover’s Shelf, in LEGO Form

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In 1977, Steve Jobs walked through the kitchen appliance section of a Macy’s department store and came away with a vision for what a personal computer should look like. The result, shaped by industrial designer Jerry Manock and powered by Wozniak’s engineering genius, was the Apple II: a smooth, warm-beige enclosure that suggested domesticity rather than machinery. It belonged on a desk the way a telephone did. That calculated approachability helped sell millions of units across sixteen years of production.

LEGO Ideas builder BrickMechanic57 has translated that design philosophy into 1,772 pieces, and the attention to detail rewards anyone familiar with the original. The signature Pantone beige carries across the computer body, monitor, and dual Disk II drives. The rainbow Apple II badge sits front and center above the keyboard. Pull out the monitor screen and you get two display states: the authentic green-on-black DOS boot screen or a clean, powered-off black panel.

Designer: BrickMechanic57

Wozniak designed the Disk II floppy controller over the 1977 Christmas holidays and reduced the chip count from the industry standard of dozens down to six. Competing controllers from the same era used 50-plus chips and cost significantly more. Apple sold the Disk II for $495 in 1978, and the engineering inside that price point was borderline absurd. BrickMechanic57 stacks two of them beside the main unit, exactly as they appeared on real desks, and a brick-built floppy disk element actually inserts into the lower drive.

The real Apple II keyboard had no cursor keys in its original 1977 configuration, a REPT key for repeating characters, and RESET sitting exposed and dangerous in the top-right corner like a trap for clumsy typists. The close-up render of this build shows every one of those details reproduced faithfully, including the staggered layout, the CTRL and ESC placement, and the POWER button isolated at the lower left. The rainbow Apple II badge above it is sharp enough to make a vintage collector emotional.

The swappable monitor screen states are what separate a good LEGO set from a great one. The LEGO NES set had the working cartridge slot. The LEGO Atari 2600 had the joystick. This build has a DOS boot screen reading “APPLE II / DOS VERSION 3.3 SYSTEM MASTER / JANUARY 1, 1983” in green phosphor text, and that alone justifies the piece count. The monitor face pulls out cleanly, the off-state panel drops in, and suddenly you have two different display moments from the same machine’s life.

LEGO Ideas is the platform where fan-designed builds compete to become official retail sets. Any project that hits 10,000 supporter votes within its window gets reviewed by LEGO’s own designers, and the strongest candidates go into production. Previous successes include the NES, the Polaroid OneStep SX-70, and the Atari 2600. BrickMechanic57’s Apple II has 587 days left on the clock. Voting is free on the LEGO Ideas website, and if this one makes it to shelves, it will be because enough people who care about this history showed up.

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This Resin Chair Has a Real iMac, Magic Keyboard, and Mouse Sealed Inside It… Because ‘Art’

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There’s a common saying that beauty hurts. Pretty shoes that blister your heels by noon. A dress cut so perfectly that breathing becomes a optional. The needle of a tattoo tracing something meaningful into your skin. Or even a surgical knife, for the dream of a better face or physique. People have always been willing to trade comfort for something that looks or feels transcendent, and the logic has always made a strange kind of sense. What I never anticipated was applying that same sentiment to sitting on an iMac.

Dip1, a chair by Korean designer Lim Wootek, takes that idea literally. The backrest is a real iMac monitor, its slim aluminum frame pressed against your spine as you settle in. It sounds wrong. It feels wrong. And somehow, that wrongness is exactly what makes it so addictive to look at. The keyboard, mouse, and storage bins are encased beneath the seat in a glowing block of cyan resin, visible through the haze like memories you recognize but can no longer touch. I guarantee you, you’ll grimace at the thought of sitting on the chair, as you lean back against what might be the most expensive and engineered backrest known to mankind.

Designer: Lim Wootek

The resin block is where the craft gets interesting. Lim sealed a full Apple Magic Keyboard, a Magic Mouse, and a set of colored desktop storage bins inside the body of the chair. The bins are the kind that live on studio shelves holding batteries, USB cables, and every small object that never quite found a permanent home. Through the semi-translucent resin, their shapes read clearly near the seat surface and dissolve into soft blur toward the base. That gradient from legible to ghosted is the whole thesis of the piece made physical, and it required real material control to pull off at this scale.

The iMac is a 27-inch model, the flat-chinned aluminum design that Apple ran from 2012 through 2022, with the display sitting at 68.6cm diagonally and the full unit standing around 65cm tall. These are not small numbers, and the chair has the presence to match. The monitor backrest positions the screen at exactly the height you would have once made eye contact with it, which means the sitter has literally turned their back on it. The screen now faces outward, away from the person in the chair, and that single spatial decision carries more conceptual weight than most designers manage in an entire project.

Standard seat height on the resin block sits at around 45cm, which is ergonomically normal, and that normality is part of what makes the piece so disorienting. You could actually sit in this. People do sit in this, as the campaign photos show. A figure in all black, hooded, leaning back against the aluminum monitor stand with the posture of someone who has fully accepted the situation. The chair functions, and that functionality makes the statement sharper rather than softer.

Lim Wootek’s studio works across industrial design, digital design, mold design, and CMF, and Dip1 has all four disciplines firing together. The resin body has soft radii on the seat edges and a gently tapered base that stops it from reading as a plain block. The cyan is specific, close to shallow tropical water, which is why the submerged objects feel genuinely drowned rather than just encased. Getting optical clarity, structural load capacity, and color depth to coexist in a resin cast this large is a serious material engineering problem, and the fact that it reads as effortless is the tell of someone who actually knows what they’re doing.

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AI Mini PCs Don’t Need to Hide: This One’s a Sci-Fi Pyramid

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Mini PCs used to be defined by how invisible they could be, small black rectangles tucked behind monitors or under shelves. That made sense when they were just low-power desktops, but feels out of step now that these machines are running models, listening, watching, and routing data. If AI is going to sit on your desk, it might as well look like it belongs there instead of hiding like a piece of infrastructure.

M5Stack’s AI Pyramid Computing Box leans into that idea, turning an edge-AI platform into a small pyramid that looks more like a sci-fi artifact than a router. There are two versions, a transparent 4 GB model that shows off its internals and RGB light bars, and a Pro 8 GB version in a solid gray shell that keeps the same silhouette but reads more like a piece of industrial hardware. Both share the pyramid form and the underlying platform.

Designer: M5Stack

The pyramid shape goes beyond visual gimmick and gives the device a clear front edge where all the serious ports live, dual HDMI, dual Gigabit Ethernet, four USB-A, and USB-C power, while the sloping faces leave room for vertical RGB strips and a small OLED status window. The top becomes a natural exhaust point for the turbo fan, turning the whole volume into a kind of thermal chimney that glows when the system is alive.

Inside the pyramid is Axera’s AX8850 SoC, an octa-core Cortex-A55 at 1.7 GHz paired with a 24 TOPS NPU and hardware 8K H.264/H.265 encode and decode. The 4 GB model splits its LPDDR4x as 2 GB for the system and 2 GB for accelerators, while the Pro doubles that to 4 GB plus 4 GB, giving more headroom for local vision pipelines, speech models, or compact language models running under Linux.

On a desk, the AI Pyramid sits between a monitor and a small camera array, its dual HDMI outputs or input-plus-output feeding displays while the dual Ethernet ports bridge a home network and an isolated camera VLAN. The four-mic array and built-in speaker let it act as a local assistant or meeting transcriber, while the OLED strip quietly shows IP addresses or system load, and the RGB bars pulse to indicate activity.

Giving an AI mini PC a recognizable silhouette changes how you relate to it. A flat box disappears, which is fine for a dumb hub, but a device that is running models, listening, and orchestrating other hardware benefits from a form you can read at a glance. The AI Pyramid leans into that, making the thermal core, the ports, and even the status lights part of a small, legible object that feels like it was designed to share your desk rather than hide behind it.

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Maingear Retro98 Is the 90s Dream PC Finally Built with 2026 Hardware

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Late-’90s desktops hummed under desks in beige towers that always felt heavier than they should. CRTs flickered, CD drives whirred, and somewhere in every PC gamer’s mind lived a fantasy build they only saw in shop windows or magazine ads. The gap between the family PC that struggled with Quake and the dream rig you sketched in notebooks, complete with turbo buttons and drive bays, felt impossibly wide.

Maingear’s Retro98 is that fantasy finally built. The limited-run sleeper PC uses a retro beige SilverStone tower with a working turbo button and keyed power lockout, but hides 2026 hardware inside. The pitch is simple: 1998 on the outside, 2026 inside. It is the machine your younger self would have lost their mind over if they could see past the beige and understood what an RTX 5070 even meant.

Designer: Maingear

Water-cooled Retro98α

Retro98 feels more like a drop than a product line. Maingear limited it to 38 units: 32 standard builds and six water-cooled Retro98α rigs with braided ketchup-and-mustard cables. The brand positions it as something you will not find at a big-box store, and points out that you will not even find a Radio Shack next week. Each system is hand-built by a single technician, making it feel closer to a limited sneaker release than a typical prebuilt.

Even the lowest spec overshoots anything you could have imagined in 1998. The Retro98 5070 pairs an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5070 with an Intel Core Ultra 7 265K, 32 GB of DDR5 at 6000 MT/s, and a 2 TB NVMe SSD. This is the kind of machine that runs Cyberpunk smoothly while looking like it should be loading StarCraft from a stack of jewel cases on the desk.

Of course, the front-panel rituals matter as much as the internals. The keyed power lock feels like something your parents would have used to keep you off the PC, and the fully functional turbo button now toggles performance profiles instead of pretending to overclock a 486. These physical interactions turn booting up into a tiny ceremony, a reminder of when pressing power felt like entering a different world rather than unlocking another screen.

Behind the retro faceplate, you still get modern conveniences. USB-C on the front, Wi-Fi 7, Bluetooth 5.4, and a clean Windows 11 install without bloatware. The machine is not trying to recreate the pain of driver floppies or IRQ conflicts. It is just borrowing the shell and the attitude. You get the look and the jokes, but you also get quiet fans, instant game launches, and none of the frustration.

Retro98 is not about value per frame but about finally owning the mythical beige tower you stared at in catalogs. It is for people who remember sharing a/s/l in chat rooms and slapping CRTs after another buffer underrun, and who now have the budget to indulge that memory. A beige box with a turbo button probably should not feel fresh in 2026, but somehow it does, which says more about how boring glass-and-RGB towers have gotten than it does about nostalgia.

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This $170 Retro Dock Solves the Mac Mini M4’s Biggest Port + Connectivity Problem With Style

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Apple’s Mac mini M4 is absurdly powerful for its size, but connecting anything to it requires a patience-testing game of dongle Tetris. The Wokyis M5 fixes this the fun way, wrapping your diminutive desktop in a retro Macintosh shell that’s actually packed with ports and storage. Yes, the naming is confusing since there’s no Mac mini M5 yet, but the compatibility story is straightforward: this works with the M4, M2, and M1 Mac minis, plus any Mac with Thunderbolt 3/4/5 ports.

Inside that beige plastic homage to computing history, you’ll find legitimately fast 10Gbps connectivity on both USB-A and USB-C ports, card readers that hit 312MB/s with UHS-II cards, and a tool-free M.2 enclosure with included thermal pads for proper heat management. The 5-inch screen displaying “hello” works as a proper 720p panel for desktop widgets, music lyrics, photo frames, or system stats. Testing shows the SSD enclosure delivers around 900 MB/s with quality NVMe drives, which is respectable for a hub in this price range. The design lets you access the Mac mini’s own ports through a removable bottom panel, so nothing gets sacrificed in the name of aesthetics.

Designer: WOKYIS

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Photographers and video editors know the Mac mini M4’s port limitation intimately. Three Thunderbolt 4 ports and two USB-A ports sound adequate until your monitor claims one, your external SSD takes another, and you’re suddenly rationing connectivity like it’s a finite resource. The front panel of the M5 solves this with two USB-A 10Gbps ports, one USB-C 10Gbps port, and SD plus microSD slots that handle UHS-II speeds at 312MB/s. Offloading a 128GB card from a photo shoot takes minutes instead of the geological timescale you’d experience with slower readers. You do this without unplugging anything or performing cable gymnastics behind your monitor.

The M.2 enclosure accepts NVMe drives from 2230 to 2280 form factors and supports up to 8TB of storage. Pair it with a Samsung 990 EVO Plus and you’ll see read and write speeds hovering around 800 to 900 MB/s, which translates to genuinely usable performance for 4K editing timelines or RAW photo libraries. Wokyis ships two thermal pads in the box: a thicker one for single-sided SSDs and a thinner variant for double-sided drives. The passive cooling approach works because there’s actual thought behind the thermal management rather than hoping convection does all the heavy lifting. No fans means no noise, which matters when you’re recording voiceovers or working in a quiet space.

That 5-inch display hits 1280×720 resolution at roughly 290 PPI, putting it squarely in Retina territory for normal viewing distances. Text renders crisp, colors track accurately for casual use, and brightness handles typical indoor lighting without struggle. You can feed it content through the HDMI-in port or the USB-C host connection depending on your setup preferences. People are running Spotify controls on it, system monitoring dashboards, security camera feeds, even Slack notifications. The dedicated power button on the front means you can kill the screen when you don’t need it running, which beats having a perpetually glowing display burning into your peripheral vision at 2 AM.

Wokyis nailed the proportions by treating the original Macintosh as inspiration rather than a blueprint to slavishly recreate. The beige matches Apple’s classic off-white perfectly, the ventilation grills reference the original’s cooling design, and that rainbow stripe sits exactly where your brain expects it. The dimensions wrap the Mac mini M4 specifically, with a removable base plate that keeps every native port accessible. You’re adding capability on top of what Apple gave you rather than trading functionality for aesthetics. The Mac mini slides in, locks down, and you’ve suddenly got a setup that looks like it time-traveled from 1984 while performing like it’s from 2025.

Generic USB-C hubs from Anker or CalDigit run $80 to $150 and offer similar port counts with zero personality. None of them include an SSD enclosure or a display. The M5 at $169.99 lands in a weird value proposition where you’re paying a modest premium for design that actually makes you happy to look at your desk. The 80Gbps Thunderbolt 5 version exists at $389 if you’re pushing enormous video files or running external GPUs, but that’s specialist territory. The 10Gbps model handles what 90% of users throw at it. Ships in two days direct from Wokyis or grab it from Amazon if you’ve got Prime and prefer that refund safety net. Either way, you’re getting a dock that makes the Mac mini M4 better at its job while looking fantastic doing it.

Click Here to Buy Now

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AYANEO AM03 Is Designed to Display on Your Desk, Not Hide

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Most mini-PCs are treated like necessary clutter, small black rectangles taped to the back of a monitor or shoved behind a stack of books. That makes sense if you only care about ports and benchmarks, but it feels at odds with the attention people now give to desk setups, where everything else on the surface is chosen to be seen, from the keyboard to the mousepad to the plant in the corner.

The AYANEO Mini PC AM03 is a machine that is not trying to hide. It is pitched as a desktop setup essential and entertainment powerhouse, blending a retro-inspired shell with an Intel Core i9-12900H and AYASpace 3.0. The idea is that it should be both the performance core and the visual anchor of a desk, not just another anonymous box tucked under it or behind cables.

Designer: AYANEO

AYANEO has a habit of treating hardware as design objects, and the AM03 continues that with smooth contours, refined finishes, and two colorways, Sky Blue and Ink Black. One feels airy and bright, the other more serious and moody, both meant to sit comfortably next to a monitor, keyboard, and handhelds without looking like industrial equipment that wandered in from a server rack or a crowded electronics store shelf.

The foldable front panel keeps the face of the machine clean when closed and turns into a port bay when you flip it down. That means you can keep the front visually quiet most of the time, then reveal USB ports and other connectors when you need to plug in a drive, headset, or controller. It respects the difference between everyday viewing and occasional tinkering or heavy expansion.

Under the shell sits an Intel Core i9-12900H running at a 45 W TDP, which gives the AM03 laptop-class flagship performance in a compact body. Support for up to 64 GB of dual-channel memory and PCIe 4.0 SSDs makes it comfortable handling productivity, creative work, and gaming, especially when paired with an external GPU or cloud service for more demanding titles that need extra graphics horsepower.

The large cooling system keeps that 45W chip stable under load, so long renders or game sessions do not trigger throttling. Built-in stereo speakers handle office audio and light entertainment without separate desktop speakers, simplifying a setup for people who want fewer boxes and cables on the desk and more space for the things that actually earn their spot there, like a good lamp or a notebook.

AYASpace 3.0 is the software layer that makes the AM03 feel more like a console-grade device than a barebones PC. Users can switch performance modes, tweak TDP, organize game libraries, and monitor frame rates with FPS Thunder, all from a unified interface. It turns the box into something you tune and monitor as part of the desk experience, not just a Windows machine you forget about once it boots.

The AM03 tries to answer what gaming-grade hardware should look like when it lives in a living room or home office. By combining a fold-front design, Skyline Arc RGB, and serious silicon, it suggests that a mini-PC can be both a tool and a piece of desk art, something you keep in view because you like looking at it as much as you like what it can do.

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Dell debuts world’s first 52-inch curved monitor to replace multimonitor setups

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Multimonitor setups have taken over professional and creative spheres in a big way, boosting productivity like never before. Dell has upped the ante at CES 2026 with the world’s first 52-inch ultrawide curved monitor that’s designed for data professionals who demand maximum screen real estate. The 6K IPS Black display is your command center with connectivity options that’ll leave nothing to chance.

Dell UltraSharp 52 Thunderbolt Hub Monitor is essentially a combination of a 43-inch 4K display with two 27-inch QHD vertical monitors combined into one display. It eliminates the need for multiple monitor setups, the accompanying organizing hassles, and the wire clutter.

Designer: Dell

The numbers are crazy in every aspect with the 52-inch beast. It has an ultrawide aspect ratio of 21:9 compared to the 16:9 used on most monitors. 6,144 x 2,560 resolution (at 129 pixels per inch) and the 120 Hz refresh rate supporting variable refresh rate ensure it displays any kind of content with maximum precision. Gaming is theoretically possible on this, but you’ll need to match it with a beast of a PC. The IPS Black panel might not be as sharp as an OLED, still it delivers deeper blacks, a 2000:1 contrast ratio, and professional-grade color accuracy according to Dell.

Watching such a big screen for long hours can take a toll on your eyes, and Dell has it covered with the 80 percent less blue light courtesy of the eye-comfort features. The ambient light sensor reduces the strain to a minimum by adjusting the display settings accordingly. Best of all, the monitor connects to four PCs or Macs simultaneously with the two HDMI 2.1 ports, two DisplayPort 1.4 ports, and a Thunderbolt 4 port with support for Power Delivery up to 140W. In addition to these, the monitor features three USB-C 10Gbps upstream ports, four 10Gbps USB-A ports, and an RJ45 Ethernet port. For quick access, the curved monitor has two USB-C ports and a USB-A port on the front. Both these ports support 10Gbps transfer speeds.

When connected to multiple systems, the wide screen can be partitioned into two sections. The KVM (keyboard, video, and mouse) feature allows users to connect their keyboard and mouse independently to the display. The monitor can be height-adjusted by up to 90 mm with support for tilting, swiveling, and slanting positioning for maximum work freedom. The monitor carries a price tag of $2,800, and if you want the stand, that’ll cost an extra $100. Surely, this is not a curved monitor for everyone; still, it is worth every penny for individuals who have required something like this all along.

If this huge monitor is a bit too much, Dell also announced the 32-inch UltraSharp display with 4K resolution and a QD-OLED panel. The 120 Hz refresh rate display has True Black 500 HDR and Dolby Vision support. The Dell UltraSharp 32 4K QD-OLED (U3226Q) is expected to launch in February 2026 for $2,599.

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CyberPowerPC MA-01 at CES 2026: A Clean, Quiet, and Modern PC

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Most high-end PC towers still shout for attention with exposed fans, RGB strips, and visible screws. That clashes with calmer, more considered interiors, especially when a tower lives on a desk next to a monitor and chair that look like real furniture. The MA-01 comes from the idea that performance hardware can grow up without losing its edge, treating a gaming rig as something you want to see every day instead of something you tolerate.

The MA-01 Modern Analog Series chassis is CyberPowerPC’s attempt to design a case around the beauty of what you do not see. It hides the usual clutter, guides air and light through sculpted vents and woven mesh, and frames only the GPU, CPU cooler, and memory. It is a mid-tower that wants to disappear into the room until you look closely, at which point the details start to reveal themselves, analog knobs, corner-less glass, and a top surface that looks more like furniture than electronics.

Designer: CyberPowerPC

Hiding Complexity, Framing Performance

The internal architecture conceals fans, radiators, and cabling behind multi-piece intake covers and internal shrouds, so the interior reads as a clean composition rather than a tangle of parts. The focus shifts to the GPU, cooler, and RAM, which are treated almost like objects on a stage, with consistent geometry and minimal visible mounting points. The chassis does not feel like a kit waiting to be assembled. Rather, it feels like a display case for the hardware that actually matters.

The dual curved glass panels meet without a corner pillar, creating an open-corner view that lets you see the main components from multiple angles without a vertical bar cutting through the scene. Hidden PCI bracket covers and minimized screw heads support the same idea, making the case feel more like a finished appliance than a bin of screws and panels. When you turn the case, the components stay visible and framed, not obscured by structural elements or visual clutter.

Airflow and Acoustics as Design Tools

The woven steel mesh top is one of the defining features, a surface where varying porosity and depth help break up high-frequency resonance that traditional punched vents can amplify. CyberPowerPC claims a 20-30% reduction in exhaust noise, which matters when the tower sits at ear level on a desk. The goal is to make power quieter rather than louder, so fans can spin up during intense sessions without filling the room with the usual high-pitched whine.

A full-length internal vent cover runs from the right-side intake across the bottom and up to the rear exhaust, with angled vents that redirect intake air directly onto heat-critical components. That guided airflow reduces wasted intake air and helps radiators and GPU coolers work more efficiently, which in practice means lower fan speeds and a calmer acoustic profile. It is not just about moving air, it is about moving it deliberately so the case stays quieter while still keeping temperatures in check.

Analog Controls and Tactile I/O

Three analog RGB knobs sit on the front panel, mapping to red, green, and blue in one mode and to color, brightness, and effect mode in another. You can sweep through the full 16.7-million-color spectrum and adjust effects without opening software, which appeals to builders who prefer hardware-level control and a more analog, tactile interaction. Pressing each knob activates secondary functions, so the same three controls handle color jumping, brightness, and lighting modes without menus or drivers.

The precision-molded I/O shrouds around the USB-A, USB-C, and audio ports are designed to self-center cables, absorb side impacts, and reduce insertion wear. That small detail makes daily use feel less fragile, especially when the case is on a desk where ports are used often. The framing of the ports contributes to the overall architectural, finished look, turning functional elements into part of the visual language rather than afterthoughts drilled into a panel.

Finishes, Compatibility, and Longevity

The three finishes each serve different desk environments. The warm matte off-white nods to classic beige machines while feeling contemporary, suitable for creative studios that lean toward lighter, Scandinavian palettes. The dark steel gray is a cooler alternative to black with a subtle hint of blue, fitting more traditional setups. The metallic dark silver is a more industrial counterpoint to familiar aluminum aesthetics, bridging productivity and gaming without leaning too hard into either category.

On the practical side, the MA-01 supports ATX and micro-ATX boards, including BTF-standard layouts for cleaner cable routing, and offers space for long GPUs, tall air coolers, and 360 mm radiators at the top and motherboard side. Hidden fasteners and seven expansion slots signal that the case is built for multiple hardware generations, not just a single build cycle. The compatibility range means it can handle everything from a mid-range productivity build to a high-end gaming rig with a large GPU and custom cooling loop.

CyberPowerPC at CES 2026: The Beauty of What You Don’t See

The MA-01 is a sign that gaming-class hardware can finally behave like a mature object in the room, not just a spectacle. It still moves a lot of air and lights up in any color you want, but it does so through woven mesh, sculpted vents, and analog controls that feel considered and deliberate. For people who want a powerful tower that can live on a desk without shouting, that shift in attitude is the real headline, and it suggests that the future of PC hardware might look less like a science experiment and more like something you would actually choose to keep visible in a living room or studio.

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ROG’s CES 2026 Flagships Rethink What a Gaming Machine Looks Like

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Gaming laptops have settled into a comfortable rhythm. A 16-inch clamshell, an RGB keyboard, a high-refresh panel, and a GPU that fits into a backpack. Most people buy them, use them, and expect roughly the same experience from every generation. ROG’s CES 2026 lineup arrives at a moment when AI hardware, OLED panels, and new hinge engineering are all maturing at once, and the company seems very interested in experimenting with what that makes possible.

ROG’s most interesting products are not just faster versions of last year’s machines. The Zephyrus Duo GX651 stretches the idea of a laptop into a dual-screen workstation with five operating modes, while the Flow Z13-KJP shrinks a gaming PC into a tablet-sized slab with enough unified memory and NPU power to run a 70-billion-parameter language model on a train. Supporting them are the refreshed Zephyrus G14 and G16 ultraportables and the holographic ROG G1000 desktop.

Designer: ASUS Republic of Gamers (ROG)

ROG Zephyrus Duo GX651

The Duo is the laptop for people who never have enough screen space. Both the main and secondary panels are 16-inch 3K ROG Nebula HDR OLED touchscreens running at 120 Hz with 0.2 ms response times, 100% DCI-P3, and ΔE < 1 color accuracy. In practice, that means a game or timeline can live on the top screen while chat, mixer controls, or reference material sit on the lower one, without feeling like a cramped compromise.

The 320-degree hinge and kickstand let the Duo shift between five operating modes, from traditional clamshell to dual-screen desktop, presentation stand, or drawing surface. A full-size wireless keyboard and touchpad can move off the chassis entirely, so you can push the screens closer and treat the machine like a tiny dual-monitor rig on a hotel desk or studio table. It is a laptop that behaves more like a modular workstation than a fixed shape.

ROG packs up to an Intel Core Ultra processor and an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090 Laptop GPU, up to 64 GB of LPDDR5X memory, and up to 2 TB of PCIe Gen 5 SSD storage into a chassis that measures 0.77 in thick and weighs about 6.28 lb. ROG Intelligent Cooling uses liquid metal, a vapor chamber, dual fans, and a dedicated graphite sheet for the second display to keep both panels and the chassis comfortable during long sessions.

ROG Flow Z13-KJP

The Flow Z13-KJP is a 13.4-inch 2-in-1 that leans into AI as much as gaming. It runs an AMD Ryzen AI Max+ 395 with Radeon 8060S graphics and a 50 TOPS NPU, paired with up to 128 GB of LPDDR5X unified memory at 8,000 MT/s. ROG explicitly says that the combination can run a 70-billion-parameter LLM locally, which is a very different pitch from “this tablet can play your favorite games.”

The Z13-KJP uses a 16:10 QHD Nebula display at 180 Hz with 500 nits brightness and 100% DCI-P3, protected by Gorilla Glass DXC. The chassis mixes aluminum with real carbon fiber on the back, weighs about 1.75 kg, and measures 14.6 mm thick. ROG Intelligent Cooling with liquid metal, a vapor chamber, and second-generation Arc Flow fans keeps the Ryzen AI chip and integrated graphics from throttling when running AI workloads or games.

The Kojima Productions collaboration is more than a paint job. Designed by Yoji Shinkawa and inspired by Ludens, the Flow Z13-KJP ships with custom Armoury Crate themes and wallpapers, plus matching peripherals like the Delta II-KJP headset and Keris II Origin-KJP mouse. The detachable RGB keyboard cover with 1.7 mm travel and built-in kickstand let it flip between console-style play, creator tablet, workstation, or ultraportable laptop, treating gaming, creation, and AI experimentation as different moods rather than separate devices.

ROG Zephyrus G14 and G16

ROG Zephyrus G14

The Zephyrus G14 and G16 are the ultra-slim siblings that round out the laptop story. The G14 uses a 14-inch 3K Nebula HDR OLED at 120 Hz, weighs 1.5 kg, and measures 1.59 cm thick, while the G16 offers a 16-inch 2.5K Nebula HDR OLED at 240 Hz, weighs 1.85 kg, and measures 1.49 cm thick. Both can be configured with Intel Core Ultra processors, up to RTX 5080 or RTX 5090 Laptop GPUs, and Copilot+ PC certification.

ROG Zephyrus G16

The Slash Lighting array on the lid, upgraded from seven zones to 35, gives both machines a more refined aesthetic, while the CNC-aluminum chassis, liquid metal thermal compound, and six-speaker audio systems with dual woofers keep them firmly in the premium tier. They are the machines for people who want serious gaming and creative horsepower but still need something that can slip into a backpack for travel and daily use without feeling like a compromise.

ROG G1000 Desktop

The ROG G1000 is the desktop counterpart, a 104 L ATX ultra-tower built to be seen as much as used. At its core, the built-in AniMe Holo fan is the world’s first holographic fan system in a prebuilt gaming PC, projecting customizable holographic visuals through the front panel. The fan sits in an independent chamber with a hinge-door design, so the airflow does not interfere with the main components, and system noise stays low.

The ROG Thermal Atrium, dedicated to CPU cooling, channels fresh air through a 420 mm AIO liquid cooler with three fans and isolated airflow paths. Equipped with up to AMD Ryzen 9 9950X3D and ROG Astral GeForce RTX 5090 or AMD Radeon 9070XT GPUs, up to 128 GB DDR5 memory with AEMP II, and up to 4 TB PCIe 5.0 SSD storage, the G1000 is tuned and ready for peak performance from day one. Quick control keys on the chassis, extensive Armoury Crate and Aura Sync lighting control, and easy tool-less access for upgrades make it a desktop that earns its showpiece status by actually being usable as a daily driver.

ROG at CES 2026: Form Factors for the Next Decade

The Zephyrus Duo and Flow Z13-KJP are two answers to the same question: what does a gaming machine look like when AI, OLED, and new hinges are all on the table? The Duo stretches the laptop into a dual-screen studio that can sit at the center of a desk, while the Flow Z13-KJP compresses a Copilot+-class PC into a tablet that can run massive models on the go. For Yanko Design readers, the interesting part is not just the jump to RTX 5090 or 50 TOPS NPUs, but the way those specs are being used to justify new shapes, new workflows, and new ways of thinking about what a gaming laptop or tablet can be when you stop assuming it has to look like every other machine released in the past decade.

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