Hardware Asylum at CES 2026

Not much has really changed in the types of products that were being shown.  Most of them are copies of copies with others being incremental updates to existing products.  For instance, Phison was showing some AI offerings and the new E37T controller.  This Gen5 4-channel controller is quite fast a 14.7 GB/s and extremely efficient with an active power of around 2.3W.

The only real update here is that with a more efficent controller the overall temperatures should be lower and save you whatever several watts of power can buy you in the real world.  Since Phison is a supplier you can look forward to seeing these new controllers coming to a popular storage brand near you.

At the Gigabyte booth there were some refresh motherboards in display with the X3D name.  Given that these are AMD Ryzen motherboards I can only assume they are built and tuned to take advantage of the larger Ryzen X3D processor cache and performance advantage.

I also have to chuckle at the design of the AORUS GeForce RTX 5090 Infinity graphics card.  It seriously is a unique design and seems like a cross between the TRON Light Cycle and the thrusters on a Star Wars Podracer.  Of course, what you cannot see is the center fan behind the metal screen because you cannot sell a retail consumer level video card without three fans,... for reasons.

InWin might have had one of the most interesting cases on display called the AEON.  For those who do not know, there is a design group inside InWin who design and build a special chassis for that year.  This is done mostly to show off what InWin can do but also to make a few headlines.

For instance, cases like the S Frame, made from a single folded chunk of aluminum and tempered glass and organic 3D printed design called the Yong, were special designs launched around Computex for elite computer enthusiasts.

What made the AEON special has a hydraulic actuator that will open up the back of the case to expose the internal components.  This allows you access to work on the PC and when you are done, the hydraulics will close everything back up again.

The front of the AEON was a series of two way mirrors and you would be suprised at what these mirrors will capture.