A stable PC market remains as "elusive" as ever IDC remarks as it reduces earlier 2016 forecasts-- the analyst says global 2016 shipments will drop by -7.3%, roughly -2% below earlier projections by the analyst.

The cause for such declines are "weaker than expected" conditions caused by weak currencies, depressed commodity prices, political uncertainty and delayed projects. Further confirming such conditions are Q1 2016 shipment drops reaching -12.6% Y-o-Y, down from IDC forecasts of -11.3%.

On the consumer side the shipments remain constrained by financial pressures across regions and a variety of alternatives,such as delaying a PC replacement by using the free Windows 10 upgrade or using a mobile device. Meanwhile on the enterprise side companies are still evaluating Windows 10, meaning commercial PC shipments are still to stablise.

Gigabyte follows the example of Asus and PowerColor as it presents a prototype external GPU dock at Computex 2016-- a means for customers to easily add more graphical horsepower to underpowered laptops.

Few details are available on the Gigabyte GPU dock, but in good news to potential users it appears to be using a Thunderbolt 3 connector over USB-C instead of a proprietary connection. In less good news it features a power supply of just 250W, meaning it will not be able to handle beefier GPUs (not to mention the Asus and PowerColor competition uses 500W PSUs).

HP announces a comeback of the Omen gaming PC brand-- one initially available in the shape of two laptops, a desktop PC and a 32-inch WVA display, all featuring black design replete with red highlights.

The company first used the Omen name back in 2014 in a gaming laptop designed to bring back memories of Voodoo, a gaming-focused PC maker HP acquired way back in 2006. The same can be said for the new Omen products, since all include the diamond-shaped logo from the original Voodoo brand.

As mentioned earlier the 2016 Omen lineup offers two laptops-- one 15.6-inch, the other 17.3-inch. Both feature either FHD or 4K/UHD displays, a choice Intel Skylake CPUs (up to a Core i7-6700HQ), either Nvidia GeForce GTX 950M, 960M or 965M GPU, up to 16GB DDR4 RAM, up to 4TB HDD and 512GB PCIe SSD.

Casemaker Lian-Li presents a first steel chassis range-- the Ebonsteel series, offering three steel-hewn mid-tower chassis with features such as vibration-dampened PSU mounts, drive cages and removable mesh filters on fan mounts.

Consisting of the PC-K5, the PC-K6 and the PC-K6S, the series is described by the company as ideal for gamers with a more limited budget through the inclusion of "competitive air and water cooling support, support for full ATX builds, and convenient building features." All fit 120 x 240 x 60mm (K5, K6S) radiators, offer 7 expansion slots and include x3 120mm fans.

In other features, the PC-K5 includes x2 5.25-inch bays, x1 USB 3.0 port, x2 USB 2.0 ports and HD audio inputs in the top panel. It supports 250mm ATX PSUs and CPU coolers up to 160mm.

The ongoing decline of the PC market is not so much "olds" as "ancients by" now, yet Gartner insists several profit opportunities still exist in the space, including premium ultramobiles and gaming PCs.

"PCs are no longer the first or only devices users are choosing for internet access," the analyst says. "Over the last 5 years, global shipments of traditional PCs (desktops and notebooks) have fallen from 343m units in 2012 to an estimated 232m units in 2016. In terms of revenue, the global PC market has contracted from $219m in 2012 to an expected $137m in 2016."

The result, of course, is PC vendors (and by extension retailers) struggling to maintain profitability, leading to record Y-o-Y declines and PC market exists. In addition regional markets are changing, as low oil prices and political uncertainties turn emerging growth drivers into laggards while established territories cut the number of PCs per households.

Nvidia announces the first consumer products based on Pascal architecture-- the GeForce GTX 1080 and 1070, both claiming to beat the flagship GTX Titan X in performance, efficiency and even pricing.

The successor to Maxwell, Pascal was first seen in a product designed for supercomputers, the Tesla P100. It promises "massive leaps in performance, memory bandwidth and power efficiency" through construction using a 16nm FinFET process packing 7.2 billion transistors on the GPU. The cards also offer 8GB of GDDR5X RAM and clock speeds reaching over 1700MHz.

The result, according to Nvidia, allows the GTX 1080 to deliver x2 the performance and x3 the efficiency of the GTX Titan X. Further showing off the capabilities of the GTX 1080 was a launch demonstration running Paragon (the latest shooter from Epic Games) at 60fps with GPU clock speeds of 2.1GHz and the memory clock running at 5508MHz with a temperature of 67 degrees Celsius, all while the card was neither air- nor water-cooled.

Jide, developer of the desktop-oriented Android-based Remix OS, teams up with display maker AOC to create the Mars-- an All-in-One (AIO) PC running on the operating system primarily aimed at the Chinese enterprise market.

Remix OS is a free Android fork designed to turn the Google mobile OS into something more suitable for tablets, laptops and mini-desktop PCs. Currently in beta form, it adds Windows-style features such as floating windows, keyboard and mouse support, taskbar, a Start-style button and a file manager.

The Mars is not the first product running on Remix OS, since the software is already available in a Surface-style Ultratablet and the Mini palm-size PC. It features a 23.8-inch 1920x1080 resolution display, an Amlogic S905 quad-core ARM Cortex-A42 CPU, 2GB and either 16 or 64GB of storage. Connectivity comes through x2 HDMI, x4 USB and x1 ethernet ports.

Phanteks reveals the Enthoo EVOLV ATX Tempered Glass Edition-- a self-explanatory update on last year's Enthoo EVOLV chassis featuring tempered glass panels on both left and right sides, as well as RGB lighting.

Fronting the chassis is a sandblasted aluminium front panel, while the rest of the chassis features construction in 3mm aluminium sheets complete with quick release mechanisms on the other panels and dust filters.

Motherboard support includes E-ATX (up to 264mm wide), ATX, Micro ATX and Mini ITX.

Meanwhile the aforementioned RGB LED lighting includes static, breathing and colour cycle patterns, and customers wanting even more lighting colour schemes and effects can get the optional PH-LEDKT_M1/M2 expansions.