TechPowerUp Best of CES 2026

Introduction

The International Consumer Electronics Show (CES), remains the big daddy of technology trade-shows, held in the second week of each new year. It’s here that the who’s who of consumer electronics and computing showcase their very latest tech, setting the tone for the year ahead. It’s here that key milestones in company roadmaps are either announced or showcased. We’ve been going to CES for 19 years now, and the show continues to grow, both in crowds and sheer numbers of exhibitors with their latest products. As part of our coverage, our on-ground reporters visited over 110 brands, snapping and detailing thousands of products.

We set up a dedicated page for our 2026 International CES coverage so you can read our news articles specific to each brand. Our reporters on the ground carefully evaluated every brand and product they’ve come across, and after much deliberation, identified products that stood out in the show. These are products that innovate on multiple fronts, and could be pivotal to their respective product categories, likely to inspire other brands. These were then awarded the TechPowerUp Best of CES 2026 trophy.

TechPowerUp’s Best of CES 2026 awards recognize products that push boundaries in innovation, quality, design, and appeal—truly balanced hardware that might become your ideal choice. We do not categorize awards by hardware type, instead honoring any standout items meeting our standards. This method enabled selecting several entries per category, particularly benefiting those with the greatest breakthroughs this year, rather than areas with only minor enhancements in aesthetics and performance. Consequently, we’ll list our honorees alphabetically.

Alphacool Drip H1 Case

Alphacool brought its latest DIY liquid cooling gear to CES this year, but its stand-out product was the Drip H1, a game console-sized SFF PC case that’s designed with a high-end liquid cooling solution for the CPU and GPU, letting you build powerful Mini-ITX and MoD (mobile on desktop) gaming PC builds that are highly portable and can be lugged around to e-sports events. Inside is a series of full-coverage water blocks, pumps, and custom-sized radiators that can tame even high-end CPUs and GPUs, and a unique new loop construction Alphacool refers to as “monocoque.” Two 80 x 240 mm radiators and six 80 mm fans handle ventilation and heat dissipation. To be able to bring 9800X3D + RTX 5090 kind of power to bear in such a compact and highly portable package is why the Drip H1 wins our Best of CES award.

Catch our coverage of the Alphacool booth here.

ASUS ROG Zephyrus Duo (2026)

The 2026 ASUS ROG Zephyrus Duo is the most innovative gaming notebook we’ve come across this year. The company has been making the Zephyrus series since 2023, but with its 2026 edition, dialed things way up with the hardware on offer. Its form-factor is really easy to intuit—imagine both halves of the laptop clamshell being 3K OLED 120 Hz touchscreens, with a breakout wireless component holding the keyboard and trackpad. You can use the notebook without this breakout component, where one of the screens turns into a touchscreen, or you can set up a slick dual-display setup. The notebook can also be used like a convertible tablet.

Where ASUS pushed the boundaries this year is with the hardware, cooling, and display technology crammed into a device that’s no more than 1.9 cm thick, weighing no more than 2.8 kg. Each of the two displays is an ASUS ROG Nebula HDR unit with 2560 x 1600 pixels resolution, 1100 nits maximum brightness, 120 Hz refresh-rate, using the latest Corning DXC glass. The displays are also fully certified for NVIDIA G-SYNC. ASUS also innovated a new graphite-sheet thermal pad for its vapor-chamber based cooling system. Under the hood is an Intel Core Ultra 9 386H “Panther Lake” processor, an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090 Laptop GPU, 64 GB of LPDDR5X memory, and 2 TB Gen 5 SSD; along with a 90 Wh battery with 250 W fast-charging.

Catch our coverage of ASUS and ASUS ROG here.

ASUS ROG Crosshair X870E Glacial Build

ASUS put together an example build of its Glacial-branded, white color schemed ROG components. While not a product in and of itself, this build is a perfect example of ecosystem-building by hardware manufacturers, of products spanning multiple categories that are capable of forming solid, aesthetically-cohesive units. At the heart of the build is the ASUS ROG Crosshair X870E Glacial motherboard rocking an AMD Ryzen 9 9950X3D processor; an ROG Astral RTX 5090 White Edition graphics card, a ROG Thor Platinum III White Edition 1200 W PSU, ROG Strix SLC IV 360 ARGB LCD White Edition AIO CLC, and ROG Cronox White Edition case.

Find our coverage of the elusive ROG Crosshair X870E Glacial here.

Corsair GALLEON 100 SD Keyboard

Corsair GALLEON 100 SD is a fantastic full-size gaming keyboard that’s about the size of a standard 100% format keyboard, with a very visible difference. The Numpad makes way for a full-featured integrated Stream Deck from Elgato. There are two programmable rotary knobs, a 3-inch true-color touchscreen, and 12 OLED display keys like the ones you find in an Elgato Stream Deck. This eliminates the need for a discrete Stream Deck.

The actual keyboard is in a TKL format, though you can turn the Stream Deck into a Numpad whenever you want to. Corsair offers a comprehensive software suite developed by its Elgato division that lets you program the Stream Deck and how it should behave during a game or streaming session.

We went hands-on with the Corsair GALLEON 100 SD in this article.

Good Way Thunderbolt 5 Graphics Dock

Your eGPU needn’t be an enclosure, it can be a dock. Your graphics card needn’t be encased, but breathe freely. That is the design philosophy behind the Good Way Thunderbolt graphics dock. This dock takes advantage of Thunderbolt 5, and packs a 700 W ATX 3.1 power supply that can feed your graphics card power via a modern 12V-2×6 connector. That’s not all, it can expand your notebook’s connectivity with a further Thunderbolt 5 link downstream for daisy-chaining your DAS, some additional USB-C ports, and an SD Express card reader. The best case for graphics cards is no case at all, and Good Way figured this out, for which it wins our Best of CES 2026 award.

Learn more about the Good Way Thunderbolt 5 eGPU dock in this article.

Hisense XR10 Tri-Laser Projector

Hisense is blurring the lines between home cinema and the theaters, with its phenomenal new tri-laser projector, the XR10. This beamer runs an LPU 3.0 Digital Laser Engine with a pure RGB triple laser light source to output 6,000 ANSI lumens. It uses a 16-element all-glass lens system and an IRIS system that automatically adjusts aperture to achieve 6,000:1 contrast. The projector also comes with a 2x optical zoom lens that lets you use screen sizes ranging between 65-inch and 300-inch. The projector features four environmental cameras that give it automatic keystone correction capability. For these and more, the Hisense XR10 bags our Best of CES award for being literally brilliant.

This article covers Hisense home cinema projectors at CES 2026.

LG Gram Pro 16Z90U Dual AI Ultra Portable

The LG Gram Pro 16Z90U is a fantastically light ultraportable notebook that can give the latest MacBook Air a run for its money with the kind of compute power it brings to the table for its weight. The notebook features LG’s latest 16:10 aspect ratio 2880 x 1880 display, and a plethora of hardware options that include Intel Core Ultra 300U “Panther Lake” and AMD Ryzen AI 400 “Gorgon Point” processors, LPDDR5X-8533 memory, integrated graphics, and a 77 Wh battery. But these are hardly its best features—the thing weighs just 1.2 kg, and incorporates the company’s new Aerominium construction, a new aluminium alloy unibody chassis design LG innovated, for which it earns our Best of CES award.

Learn more about Aerominium and the LG Gram AI 2026 lineup here.

MSI GeForce RTX 5090 LIGHTNING Z

This CES saw a new crop of premium custom-design GeForce RTX 5090 graphics cards, and the pack was led by this, the MSI RTX 5090 LIGHTNING Z, a card every PC enthusiast and leaderboard climber was eager to get their hands on! Positioned above the MSI RTX 5090 SUPRIM Liquid SOC, it features a far superior PCB design based on lessons MSI learned of the RTX 5090’s electrical and thermal behavior over the past year. This card is designed to seek out and smash overclocking and benchmarking world records. Professional overclockers will strip it apart and use the bare PCB with their own extreme cooling solutions, but for the rest of its customer base, MSI is offering a high-end all-in-one liquid cooling solution, complete with a 360 mm x 120 mm radiator, and a trio of premium fans.

Check out the MSI RTX 5090 LIGHTNING Z and other new RTX 5090 graphics cards in this article.