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- By Michael Kan
- By Michael Kan
- By Michael Kan
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The Best PC DIY Gear of Computex 2026: These 10 Thrilling Upgrades Keep PC Building Fun
Computex always delivers PC-enthusiast eye candy, but this year's standouts pushed the envelope with transparent components, wood-trimmed graphics cards, unconventional cooling, and a few delightfully niche upgrades. Plus, holograms!
(Credit: Cole Kan/PCMag/ASRock/Hyte/Noctua/Silverstone)TAIPEI—To be sure, AI dominated the headlines at Computex 2026. The show's theme, "AI Together," was plastered across banners, booths, and keynote stages throughout Taipei. But some of the event's most memorable hardware wasn't found inside the workstations and rack servers powering the AI revolution. Instead, it was scattered among the booths of the usual PC DIY suspects, helping builders dream up ever more creative ways to customize, cool, power, and show off their desktop rigs.
Year after year, Computex remains the global epicenter of the PC-building hobby, showcasing the clever, specialized hardware that keeps enthusiasts tinkering and upgrading. And while soaring memory and storage prices in 2026 may be cramping builders' style, the DIY ecosystem looked very much alive across the show's halls and suites. Power supplies, motherboards, cooling gear, storage expanders, lighting, even furniture: Here are the 10 products that caught our attention most. Some solve genuine problems. Others exist simply because PC enthusiasts can't resist pushing boundaries.
AI Bosses: Our Technology Could Make It Easier to Make Bioweapons
A coalition of AI and science leaders is calling for tougher screening on orders of synthetic DNA, which can potentially be used to make bioweapons, as AI rapidly gets better at virology.
AI may already be designing vaccines that are showing promise in initial human trials, but, if industry leaders are to be believed, applying AI to biochemistry could also have far darker outcomes.
An open letter, signed by many of the biggest names in AI and life sciences, has warned that rapidly advancing AI could erode the “knowledge barriers which have historically prevented bad actors from obtaining biological weapons.”
Signatories included OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, and Demis Hassabis, CEO of Google DeepMind and a recipient of the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Other signees include professors at MIT, Stanford, and the University of California, as well as two former Secretaries of the US Army and Navy.
The signatories are calling on regulators to enforce mandatory screening of all orders for synthetic nucleic acids, which include synthetic DNA and RNA, and the equipment needed to make them. Researchers can order synthetic DNA online to power their research, giving small teams the ability to pursue projects that would otherwise only be available to larger institutions. However, this synthetic DNA could also theoretically be used to make bioweapons, according to peer-reviewed research.
Under the proposals, manufacturers of synthetic DNA and manufacturers of synthesis machines would be forced to check customers' synthesis requests for “sequences of concern” and to verify “customer legitimacy” before shipping their orders.
Providers would also be forced to record synthesis orders and sequence data to “support biosecurity investigations, tracing any threat back to its source.” The letter highlights research that indicated that AI systems now “outperform PhD-level virologists on questions about highly technical laboratory procedures in their own domains of expertise,” though they acknowledge that evidence on what this means for current biosecurity threats is “genuinely mixed.”
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