MSI had some cool announcements at this year's Computex, focused heavily on its partnership with Mercedes AMG Motorsport with the new Stealth 16 laptop. But after that event, I got to check out MSI's booth at the show, and there's a lot more to see. Not all of it was announced at Computex, but MSI has some really cool stuff to show off at Computex, and I had some fun looking around at these products. Here are some of my favorites, but do note that it was very crowded so it wasn't always easy to get good pictures of all the products.

DIsclaimer: MSI paid for the flight and accommodation for our trip to Taipei for Computex 2023.

The MSI Raider GE78 HX has a huge, multi-functional touchpad

I want to start right off the bat with what's probably my favorite thing from MSI's showcase, and that's the Raider GE78 HX Smart Touchpad, a new model of MSI's premium gaming laptop that has a super-cool touchpad I absolutely love. It's no secret that gaming laptops often have pretty mediocre touchpads, since most gamers are likely to use a mouse anyway. But this model of the Raider GE78 HX is completely different. It comes with a positively gigantic touchpad, even forgoing physical buttons, but it's also much more than a touchpad.

On the right side of the touchpad is a button that turns on the "smart touchpad" feature, which shrinks the touchpad to a more typical size (still fairly big) and fills the area with a series of shortcuts to all kinds of features. There's a series of buttons here that let you do things like open the emoji panel in Windows, mute your microphone, enable crosshairs for gaming, and much more. There are even five macro buttons, so you can customize shortcuts to other features you may find useful. It makes so many things easily accessible from anywhere without having to memorize a keyboard shortcut or navigate Windows.

There's also a slider and some buttons on the far right, giving you quick access to system settings like display brightness, volume, and keyboard backlight brightness, all available at a moment's notice. Again, there are other ways to change these settings, but having them so quickly accessible in an intuitive way is just really cool. I do wish there was an indicator for what slider is currently active, but from what I could see, you'll only know by adjusting the slider and seeing the effect on screen.

The idea of a multi-functional number pad isn't totally new, and Asus does it to some extent on a lot of its laptops, but this doesn't force you to give up the usual touchpad area, and it has the added benefit of giving you an absolutely massive touchpad when you don't need the quick shortcuts. Interestingly, it's also a seamless touchpad, so there are no physical edges around it. You can tell where it ends by the light bar at the top, though, which also adjusts based on whether you have the smart touchpad enabled.

Aside from that, this is just a very powerful laptop, featuring up to a 24-core Intel processor and an Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070, with a total combined power consumption of up to 215W. You do lose some performance compared to the standard Raide GE78 HX, but the RTX 4070 is already a GPU that can run any modern game without issue. The MSI Raider GE78 HX Smart Touchpad is planned to launch at some point in the second half of the year, and I'm told the goal is to launch in Q3.

MSI is doing some cool things with the design of its gaming laptops

One thing that's really noticeable across all of the laptops MSI had to show at Computex 2023 is that MSI is really trying to set its laptops apart in terms of design. It may not always be immediately obvious in every way, but pretty much every MSI gaming laptop has something unique to it that helps it stand out. For the Raider GE78 HX and GE68 HX for example, one of the most notable elements is the huge RGB light bar at the front, which is sure to get some attention if you use the laptop out in public. They also have a pretty beefy air exhaust around the hinge that gives them some personality.

A personal favorite of mine was the Vector GP68. I usually say I don't like silver-colored laptops, but I think silver is very nice in a beefy gaming laptop, and it's pretty different from the norm. MSI gave the Vector GP68 a very sort of industrial look, with engravings and small details all over.

The hinges actually have a cool bluish tone that really caught my eyes when I was checking out the laptop. I love a lot about it, though, like the engraved SteelSeries logo below the hinge, the little details around the edges, and even the bottom of the laptop (which I couldn't get a picture of, unfortunately). It really has a lot of personality, even though it's subdued at first.

I'm also a fan of the Stealth series, especially the Stealth 14 Studio. MSI is using a dual-tone look for this model, and it comes in black with a white frame, or blue with a black frame. I'm an especially big fan of white and black combined, but both of these dual-tone designs look really good. The larger Stealth 16 and 17 don't have that, but they do have top-firing speakers, which is always nice to see. The Stealth 17 even has a slightly weird-looking speaker grill to help it stand out more.

Even MSI's cheaper gaming laptops still try to have an identity, too. MSI makes the Katana, Sword, Cyborg, and Pulse series to cater to this lower-priced market, and the couple that got most of my attention were the Cyborg and Sword. As I already mentioned for the Stealth 14, combining black and white in a design is something I really like, and the Sword 15 does exactly that, so it's probably my favorite of the bunch.

The MSI Cyborg 15, though, has some translucent elements of the chassis, including the top edge of the lid and the entire bottom cover, which isn't something you see that often these days. I think it's been said multiple times by many people that translucent designs are cool, but I agree, and it's nice to see MSI doing that in a more entry-level laptop.

Oddly enough, the new AMD-powered Alpha 17 is one of the more boring-looking laptops at the show. I do find it interesting that MSI goes as far as to give these Alpha laptops a completely different logo on the lid. And while it's not the most unique, the Alpha 17 does have a premium-feeling design, with a metal lid and base cover that feel pretty sturdy. And if you prefer something more subdued, maybe this is the best option you've seen so far. It's also one of the first laptops with Wi-Fi 7 and AMD's new Dragon Range CPUs with up to 16 cores.

Of course, a big focus for MSI was the Mercedes AMG Motorsport partnership, and indeed, this special Stealth 16 model looks pretty cool. It comes in a new grey color and it has a lot of Mercedes-inspired design elements, like an air intake that spells AMG, and a special Mercedes-themed pattern on surfaces like the keyboard, the webcam area, and the hinge. Even the power button is themed, with a different color and text reading "Start Engine". In terms of performance, this kind of collaboration is pretty meaningless, but it does make for a pretty unique-looking laptop.

The MSI Commercial 14 has a lot of business features and an eco-friendly chassis

Turning to MSI's business laptop lineup, a good chunk of the focus on the newly-announced Commercial 14 laptop, which comes with pretty much everything you'd expect in a business laptop. It has plenty of ports for such a small laptop, including RJ45 Ethernet, USB Type-A, HDMI, and of course, Thunderbolt 4. You can also add a Smart Card reader and NFC support, and this was actually the first time I got to see someone use an NFC card to unlock a PC. It's an example of how important this can be as a security feature for businesses, especially since it also reduces reliance on passwords.

One thing that also got my attention with it is that the chassis is partly made with post-consumer recycled materials, something more and more brands are starting to talk about. I'm always glad to see this kind of change.

MSI also announced the Prestige 16 Studio Evo at the event earlier this week, and of course, it was at the show floor, too. What's most unique about this one is that it's one of the first laptops with discrete graphics to achieve Intel Evo certification. Of course, that's mostly due to Intel loosening some of the restrictions around that program, but it's still pretty cool to see. It means you can expect solid battery life from this one. Of course, the thin and light Prestige 13 was also there, being a lightweight business laptop at under one kilogram.

Probably my favorite series would have to be the Summit laptops, mostly because they're convertibles, which is my favorite form factor for a laptop to have. Other laptops at the show include the more affordable Modern 14 and 15, which are aimed at more mainstream business users. These are fairly basic, but they still cover the basics with solid connectivity and portability, plus they come in a few fun colors to choose from.

All of these laptops run on 13th-gen Intel processors, and MSI packs pretty powerful models in relatively small chasses. Both the Commercial 14 and Modern 15 are available with H-series processors, for example.

The MSI AI Engine can locally generate images

AI is the hot buzzword this Computex (and throughout most of the tech industry) and of course, MSI is also jumping on it. While it's not available yet, MSI was showing off its AI Engine app, which can generate images based on a word prompt. You can ask it to create any image you'd like, and it will be created in a few seconds.

The cool thing about it is that the entire thing runs locally, so you don't have to send prompts to the cloud or have an internet connection in the first place. In fact, the laptops at the show weren't connected to the internet, but the app worked just fine. It does render images at a somewhat low resolution, but you can already choose between a square aspect ratio, or either portrait or landscape, as well as between two different styles. Running the MSI Creator Z16 Studio, an image typically took around four seconds to be generated, which is pretty quick. If you don't have an internet connection, this is a pretty cool feature. Of course, companies are still trying to figure out what AI is good for, so we'll probably see other experiments around this in the future.

Project Zero is a sick-looking desktop PC

While laptops are the most interesting thing to me, MSI had a lot of cool stuff at the show that I saw while taking a look around. Easily my favorite among these was an amazing water-cooled PC called Project Zero. It's not a real product by itself, though you could probably achieve a build like this with enough effort. Both the CPU and the GPU are water cooled in this machine, with a translucent water block on both letting the RGB lighting shine through them and creating a super cool effect inside.

Both water-cooling loops also use hardline transparent tubes, and all of this seems designed to highlight the RGB lights here. There are even some seemingly random pieces of acrylic that are just there to make the lights more apparent.

One thing you'll also notice here is that there aren't a whole lot of cables inside this build. The motherboard inside it was actually engineered to have all of the power connectors on the back of the board, so it's easier to hide all the cables from view and have a clean-looking machine. The motherboard itself is also being referred to as Project Zero and it should be available later in the year. Everything here is just sick.

There are a few other desktop PCs at the show for different kinds of people. I really liked this all-white PC build that even had lit-up power connector cables inside. Here are a few pictures of other PCs the company was showing off:

One last thing I want to mention is this cool-looking keyboard (officially called the MSI Vigor GK71) that was in one of the demo stations. It wasn't really the point of the demo, but the Vigor GK71 caught my attention because while it has black tops for the keycaps, they're mostly completely transparent and it looks absolutely sick. If you like showing off RGB, I'd say this is a pretty good keyboard for it.

I really enjoyed my time around the MSI booth and some of these products and concepts are legitimately cool. I'm mostly struck by the MSI Raider GE78 HX and the Project Zero concept, but there are a lot of cool, more mainstream products on display here.