The incredible overnight industry of backpack PCs

June 7, 2016

The Computex 2016 conference ran from 31 May to 4 June, bringing with it a whole host of new hardware announcements.

With VR being the “it” thing this year, exhibitors had to solve the problem of demonstrating their new virtual reality peripherals without tethering users to a workstation.

As a result, HP, MSI, Gigabyte and Zotac all debuted “backpack PCs”, powerful mini-computers that can handle for VR gaming, but won’t result in gamers tripping over themselves or being rooted to the spot.

This is the tech behind MSI’s version:

Mobile Intel Core i7 Extreme series processor
Nvidia GeForce GTX 980 GPU
User-swappable battery that’s rated for up to 90 minutes of VR gaming.
External monitor, headphones, and of course keyboard and mouse ports located on the top of the case.
Weighs apporximately 4.5kg

The backpack PC is also fully-upgradeable and can be used as a traditional desktop.

It is not confirmed when any of these PCs will be available for purchase, but MSI has hinted that we could see a version of its backpack PC at the end of 2016.