Sapphire showcases its latest tech at Computex 2026
Sapphire had a lot of tech to show us at Computex 2026
OC3D is at Computex 2026, and we took the time to visit Sapphire at their booth. What became clear to us there was that Sapphire has transformed itself over the past year. It wasn’t long ago that the company was only known for its GPUs in enthusiast circles. Now, the company has a huge range of AMD/AM5 motherboards, many of which we have reviewed.
Below is some of Sapphire’s new Phantom Link hardware, which allows compatible GPUs to be powered cable-free via a GC-HPWR motherboard connector. We reviewed some of Sapphire’s Phantom Link hardware in April (see here).
Sapphire is now a big motherboard vendor
Sapphire now has a huge range of AMD AM5 motherboards, with Nitro+, Pure, and Pulse series motherboards being on display. Until now, building a PC with matching Sapphire motherboards and graphics cards was practically impossible. Now it’s very easy to achieve. Sapphire offers a wide range of GPU and motherboard options across various price points. I wonder if Sapphire has plans to branch out into more areas of the PC hardware market soon…
Recently, Sapphire has started releasing more white hardware, giving PC builders more aesthetic options. These options are either Sapphire Pure series products or “Polar Edition” Nitro+ products.
So far, Sapphire has not released a mainstream mini-ITX motherboard for socket AM5. I wonder if Sapphire has plans to change that anytime soon. We did check, and there were no mini-ITX enthusiast motherboards on display.
Sadly, Sapphire didn’t have any upcoming motherboards to show us. That said, this was to be expected given how new Sapphire’s AM5 lineup is. We don’t expect to see any replacements for these designs until AMD launches new Zen 6 Ryzen processors.
AI-focused PCs
It wouldn’t be Computex without a little AI talk. The Sapphire Edge AI PC has been available for a while now, and it’s a compact NUC-style device with an AMD Ryzen AI 370 series CPU. With its Radeon 890G GPU and XDNA2 NPU, this compact system can be very effective for lightweight AI use. If you need something small that can be used to host some local AI agents, this is a solid option. That said, this kit is often sold as a bare-bones PC, so expect to pay an arm and a leg to get enough DRAM.
The hardware inside the Sapphire Edge AI PC is similar to that in ASUS’ ROG Xbox Ally X, making it a capable gaming system. Yes, it won’t compete well against a system with a discrete GPU, but if it can run on a handheld, it should be able to run on this. I know this isn’t the product’s intended use case, but the potential is there.
Custom Sapphire gaming PCs
This is perhaps one of my favourite aspects of all Computex booths: custom systems. As nice as hardware displays are, nothing beats seeing them in-situ inside a fully custom PC. The crazier and more extensively modified the system, the better.
Below, we have a compact Sapphire Pulse system, which brings together a Sapphire Pulse RX 9070 GRE (which we have reviewed), a Pulse B850M WIFI motherboard, and an AMD Ryzen 5 9600X CPU. A solid gaming setup.
Next, we have a heavily customised Sapphire Nitro+ Phantom Link system. No GPU cables are visible, and Sapphire has even used a custom CPU water block to hide their coolant tubing. Very clever.
This system uses a Sapphire RX 9070 XT Nitro+ PhantomLink Edition graphics card and a Nitro+ X870EA PhantomLink Edition motherboard. This system uses an AMD Ryzen 7 9850X3D gaming CPU, making it an incredibly powerful gaming system. Note that this system also includes a Sapphire 1200X Platinum power supply.
You can join the discussion on Sapphire’s Computex 2026 presence on the OC3D Forums.
