Tom's Hardware Unfiltered: Computex 2026, Day 3 — the heat bites as our team races across Taipei

With the show floor officially open, there's plenty to see and do at the Nanggang Exhibition Center at Computex 2026. However, the reality is that for most of our team, that's not the only place that they will have to visit. At events like these, companies regularly schedule meetings outside of Computex 2026 itself, either to secure more space for their products or to show off products and concepts that aren't strictly ready for the show floor and the thousands of attendees.

In our Day 3 blog, our team of staffers has crossed Taipei, photographed exciting new hardware, and experienced the dizzying halls of TaiNEX 1 and 2. If you've not caught up on their journeys so far, be sure to read Day 0, Day 1, and Day 2 first.

Paul Alcorn: Editor-in-Chief

Another blistering day in the heat of Taiwan started with a meeting with a high-ranking Micron executive to talk about the state of the memory and storage industry. I learned a lot that I will crystallize into an article soon.

After that nice air-conditioned chat, I hit the halls, moving between multiple vendors to see the latest the industry has to offer. Asus, ROG, MSI, Patriot, Adata, and many others kept me busy throughout the day, particularly as I dug deeper into the side effects of the memory shortages. Unfortunately, not a single individual we spoke with expects any sort of recovery soon, and this will have dramatic effects on smaller module makers, the companies that make SSDs and DRAM, and a cascading effect on the other OEMs.

In fact, though Computex easily had record attendance, the halls were busier on day two than I have ever seen in my 15 years of covering this event; there were relatively few substantive announcements on the PC front. In fact, even the announcements on the data center and ODM side were exceptionally light, largely due to the impacts of supply shortages and the resulting uncertainty that has slammed the brakes on new product development.

Joe Shields: Staff Writer, Components

Three days in, and another day of 90-degree heat. It’s amazing how you can break a sweat here just by walking outside early in the morning. Today’s adventures included floating back and forth between the halls and meeting with several companies. I’ll tell you, if I see another booth with CDUs (Cooling Distribution Units), copper water blocks for AI servers, or PDUs (Power Distribution Units) supporting the AI Data Center boom, I’ll explode.

The highlight of the day has to be my second meal, Mushroom Risotto and Steak. But, because I was so entrenched in work, recovering from a spate of unexpected poor photography on my part that nearly brought my work, well, one article, to a standstill. Afterwards, I just went to bed, physically drained and mentally wiped out. Sleep… Now that’s an escapade.

There’s nothing like crashing when you’re mentally thrashed and waking up a couple of hours later practically wide awake—damn this time change. Tomorrow I’ll be all over the place, with my first meeting at a hotel, two back at the convention center, back to the same hotel for another meeting, and finally back to the convention center again. It’s certainly not the most efficient logistics, but that’s how the cookie crumbles at events like this. The most interesting man in the world says, “Stay thirsty, my friends,” but I’ll say, “Stay hydrated, friends.” One more day to go.

Jake Roach: Senior Analyst, CPUs

Well, I had to open my schedule to find out what I did today in order to write this, so if that’s not a testament to where I’m at in the Computex arc, I don’t know what is. I started my day with my final AMD roundtable of the week, this time focused on ROCm, before taking the MRT down a few stops to Intel’s demo showcase. I met with Dell and Samsung Display in the afternoon, taking a look at the XPS 13 and Samsung Display’s new QD-OLED panels, but much of my day was spent running around to various vendors, chasing down a few key stories (stay tuned on that front).

There are a lot of products at Computex, and it’s impossible to cover them all. But the most interesting conversations happen around the products, not explicitly about them. Although my gung-ho attitude earlier in the week is starting to catch up with me, I’m hitting a sleepy second wind as we close out Computex and start to peel back the curtain on what the broader industry thinks about where things are headed. Also, man, it was hot today.

Jeffrey Kampman: Senior Analyst, Graphics

I began this witheringly hot Wednesday with a surprise trip to the TICC, where Nvidia has set up its enterprise demos for this year, for some quick conversations with the leaders who are guiding the rollout of Vera Rubin and paving the way for the agentic AI future in the data center.

From there, I hopped onto the blessedly air-conditioned MRT and headed back to the Nangang Exhibition Center to criss-cross the show floor and visit some of the biggest booths at the show, including Asus, Asus ROG, MSI, and Gigabyte. And for as tough as it is out there in the consumer PC space, it’s still hard not to feel a sense of awe and wonder when you’re standing in the very center of TaiNEX 1, surrounded by countless thousands of tech enthusiasts and industry professionals, all of them hyped up by the dizzying array of new and sometimes wild stuff on display.

I closed out the day by visiting the fine folks at Noctua with Editor-in-Chief Paul, where we got a thorough deep dive into the company’s obsessively engineered solutions to problems that many PC builders wouldn’t even consider problems. Would any other company contemplate placing a tiny tuned mass damper on top of an all-in-one liquid cooler pump to smooth out its noise signature? Probably not, but Noctua did, and my ears are sensitive enough to this kind of thing for me to be seriously interested. For now, though, I am desperately in need of rest.