7
Verge Score
This pricey laptop has got sleek no-frills looks and Strix Halo strengths on lock.
HP has started offering subscriptions to rent its laptops, including its Victus and Omen gaming laptops ranging from $50 per month up to $129 per month, PC Gamer reports. There’s no option to own the laptop that you’re subscribed to, but HP will let you trade it in for an upgrade every year.
8
Verge Score
Asus made all the right tweaks, and the new Panther Lake chip delivers.
The first chip of Intel’s 18A process is speedy, even on battery power. And it’s a solid option for 1080p gaming.
I worked exclusively on a pre-production Asus Zenbook A16 with a Snapdragon X2 processor throughout CES, and I came away impressed.
Smart lights that know where they’re placed in a room, wild designs for next-gen routers, and a glowing inedible donut.
Rollable laptops, twice-folding phones, and a ‘longevity station.’ This is the CES tech we come back for.
AMD’s Strix Halo is a big, pricey chip with the best integrated graphics we’ve ever seen. The Asus TUF is the brand’s budget-friendly gaming line. So how “affordable” will Asus’s new TUF Gaming A14 laptop with Strix Halo be? We don’t know yet, because Asus hasn’t finalized pricing. But I look forward to testing this TUF.
*To be clear, this was with Intel’s XeSS upscaling, at 1080p resolution, with 4x frame gen — the actual framerate was a quarter of that. But the beefiest integrated GPU in Intel’s new Panther Lake chips never let the true framerate dip below 40fps, even unplugged, with settings that looked and felt good enough for single-player games.
After 2020’s pricey first effort, Asus is trying the Zephyrus Duo formula again.
But this time, it’s added extra space that could make its two-screen laptop setup worthwhile. Here’s Antonio with a closer look at the new Duo.
The 2026 Vivobook S14, S15, and S16, announced today at CES, pair a familiar design with new processors, including the Qualcomm Snapdragon X2 Elite, along with updated Intel Core Ultra Series 2 and AMD Ryzen AI 300 Series options.
According to Asus, the Snapdragon-powered S16 boasts 25 hours of battery life.
Acer is announcing a new Nitro V 16 AI entry-level gaming laptop with AMD’s new Gorgon Point chips. Announced at CES with a handful of other Acer laptops, the Nitro is meant to offer a budget-friendly-ish price for AMD’s new chip and Nvidia GPUs — from the RTX 5050 to RTX 5070. It’s expected in Q2, but pricing isn’t finalized.
Dell reversed course on its confusing naming scheme from 2025, but some of it’s intact — with new tweaks. The returning XPS laptops are still joined by entry-level vanilla “Dell” models. Enterprise-focused Dell Pro laptops are now topped by Dell Pro Precision models instead of the Apple-y sounding Pro Max.
Perfect? No. Better? Much.
The upcoming 14-inch HP Chromebook Plus and Chromebook Plus x360 announced at CES have been updated with Intel Core 3 N355 processors and offer up to 512GB of M.2 SSD storage, with the previous 16:9 aspect ratio displays switching to 16:10.
