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The machines on the BLAST Premier stage in 2026 are now known. In a press release datelined Taipei, Tuesday, March 10, 2026, ASUS said that its gaming brand, Republic of Gamers or ROG, will be the exclusive hardware provider for the entire 2026 BLAST Premier season, the Counter-Strike 2 circuit run by the tournament organizer BLAST.
The release names ROG as the season's official monitor and PC partner for the second year running and lists, piece by piece, the station teams will meet at all six of the circuit's major events: a 610Hz monitor, a magnetic-switch keyboard, an 8,000Hz wireless mouse and a tournament PC built around an RTX 5090 graphics card. Every specification below is the one ASUS gives for its own products.
ASUS press release of March 10, 2026. All figures are the manufacturer's own specifications.
A full season after a half one
The partnership began in the second half of 2025. In two releases dated July 29, 2025, ASUS announced that ROG would be the official monitor, PC, laptop and peripheral partner for the rest of the 2025 BLAST Premier Counter-Strike 2 series, which then meant the last three events of the year: the Bounty Season 2 in a studio in Malta from August 5 to 17, the Open Season 2 in an arena in London, and the Rivals Season 2 in Hong Kong from November 12 to 16.
The 2026 agreement covers a whole calendar. ASUS writes that ROG will power all six major events of the season, including the Bounty, Open and Rivals seasons. The release gives two of the 2026 stops by name, both quoted from BLAST's side as new locations for the circuit: Rotterdam in March and Fort Worth in May.
Related readEsports World Cup 2026 sets up 500 AI cameras with OBSBOT in ParisThe release describes the arrangement as an extension. The headline speaks of ROG extending its partnership with BLAST Premier, and the body calls it the second straight year in the role. The monitor at its center is the same model as in 2025; what the 2026 release adds is a full, standardized tournament PC, described component by component.
The station, piece by piece
ASUS lists four groups of hardware for the 2026 stage. The table sets out each one as the release describes it.
| Part | Model | What ASUS states |
|---|---|---|
| Monitor | ROG Strix XG248QSG Ace | 24.1-inch Full HD Super TN panel, up to 610Hz when overclocked, Extreme Low Motion Blur 2 |
| Keyboard | ROG Falchion Ace 75 HE | 75 percent layout, HFX V2 and V2X magnetic switches, ROG Hall sensor, Rapid Trigger |
| Mouse | ROG Harpe II Ace | ROG AimPoint Pro optical sensor, ROG Optical Micro Switches, 8,000Hz polling through ROG SpeedNova 8K wireless |
| PC | Blast Premier Esports Station | ROG Astral GeForce RTX 5090, ROG Crosshair X870E Dark Hero, AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D, ROG Thor 1600W Titanium III |
ASUS press release of March 10, 2026. The PC list is the one the release gives; it adds that the station holds more parts without naming them.
The release says all participants will play on the XG248QSG Ace monitor, and lists the Falchion Ace 75 HE keyboard and the Harpe II Ace mouse as the peripherals of the 2026 stage. It calls the PC, which carries the name Blast Premier Esports Station, Powered by ASUS, a standardized, high-end tournament rig that will be on stage at all six events, built to keep its performance under continuous tournament play. ASUS describes the whole setup as designed for near-zero latency, its own phrase for the delay between a player's action and its effect on screen.
The monitor: what 610Hz means
A monitor's refresh rate is the number of times per second it draws a new image. At 60Hz, each picture stays on screen for a sixtieth of a second; at 610Hz, the top rate ASUS gives for the XG248QSG Ace when overclocked, a new image arrives more than ten times as often, which makes motion on screen finer.
The release makes three more claims for the panel, each its own. ASUS puts the monitor's input lag, the time between the computer sending an image and the screen showing it, at 0.8 milliseconds, which it says is 56 percent lower than standard 600Hz monitors. It gives a response time, how fast a pixel changes color, of 0.1 milliseconds. And it names Extreme Low Motion Blur 2, its own technology for reducing the smearing of fast-moving objects. In its 2025 release on the same model, ASUS gave the panel's Full HD resolution as 1920 by 1080 pixels. That release gave it a color coverage of 90 percent of the DCI-P3 range, a standard used to measure how many colors a screen can show. The same 2025 release listed G-SYNC Compatible and FreeSync Premium support, systems that match a monitor's refresh to the graphics card's output. Its own specification table gave a gray-to-gray response time of 0.7 milliseconds, with 0.1 milliseconds as the minimum, where its headline cited 0.1 milliseconds alone.
Related readFortnite at the EWC 2026: controllers, macros and restart rules explainedKeyboard and mouse: magnetic switches and 8,000Hz
The keyboard on the 2026 stage, the ROG Falchion Ace 75 HE, uses what ASUS calls HFX V2 and V2X magnetic switches with a new ROG Hall sensor. In a keyboard of this kind, each key is read by a magnetic sensor that measures how far it has been pressed, instead of a metal contact that closes at one fixed point. The 75 percent layout is a compact format, smaller than a full-size keyboard.
ASUS highlights Rapid Trigger, a feature of these switches that resets a key as soon as it starts to rise rather than at a fixed point. The release says it allows an instant key reset for counter-strafing in shooters like Counter-Strike 2. Counter-strafing is the habit of tapping the opposite movement key to stop moving just before shooting; the faster a key releases, the sooner the stop.
The ROG Harpe II Ace mouse is described as ultra-lightweight, with the ROG AimPoint Pro optical sensor and ROG Optical Micro Switches for its buttons. Its polling rate, the number of times per second the mouse reports its position to the computer, is given as 8,000Hz through ROG SpeedNova 8K wireless. At 8,000 reports a second, a mouse sends its position once every eighth of a millisecond.
The 2025 releases already named the Harpe II Ace, which ASUS said had a shape co-designed with professional players, and an earlier Falchion Ace HFX keyboard. The 2026 keyboard is the newer Falchion Ace 75 HE.
The tournament PC
The PC is where the 2026 release adds the most. ASUS lists four of its components. The graphics card is the ROG Astral GeForce RTX 5090. The processor is the AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D, the motherboard the ROG Crosshair X870E Dark Hero, and the power supply the ROG Thor 1600W Titanium III, rated at 1,600 watts.
Related readFortnite tournaments to require Secure Boot, TPM and IOMMU on PCA standardized rig means that every team at an event plays on machines of the same build. ASUS writes that the station will be on stage at all six events and presents it as built for continuous tournament play.
The main 2025 partnership release named no PC or laptop model, although ROG already held the official PC and official laptop titles for the last three events of that year. One of them said ROG would supply its monitors for use by players across all match and practice sessions, which covered the practice rooms as well as the stage.
The 2026 calendar so far
Two stops of the season are already set. HLTV reported on January 3, 2026 that the first BLAST Rivals event of the year, a series that began in 2025, would be played from April 29 to May 4 at the Dickies Arena in Fort Worth, Texas: the May stop the ASUS release names. The second Rivals of the year returns to Hong Kong from November 8 to 15, with its last three days at AsiaWorld-Expo, eight teams and a prize pool of US$1,000,000, split into US$650,000 for the clubs and US$350,000 for the players.
The March stop is BLAST Open Rotterdam, held from March 18 to 29. According to HLTV's report of February 9, the event brings together 16 teams: the 12 highest-ranked teams of the global list of the February Valve Regional Standings, Valve's ranking system for Counter-Strike, and four winners of the qualifiers BLAST calls Rising, Ninjas in Pyjamas for Europe, 9z for South America, NRG for North America and TYLOO for Asia. The group stage, a double-elimination bracket in which a team is out after two series lost, is played at BLAST's studios in Copenhagen, and the best six teams move on to the playoffs at the Ahoy Arena in Rotterdam.
Rotterdam thus spans two settings in one event: a studio for the group stage and an arena for the playoffs.
Who speaks for the deal
On BLAST's side, the March 10 release quotes Alexander Lewin, the organizer's senior vice president of commercial revenue, who places the partnership alongside the circuit's new locations, Rotterdam in March and Fort Worth in May. In July 2025, the company's chief business officer, Leo Matlock, had welcomed ROG into the BLAST Premier family and said the organizer looked forward to ROG's hardware supporting the top tier of competition for the rest of that year.
The release gives no financial terms for the agreement. What it sets out is the equipment itself: the same monitor model that was BLAST Premier's official monitor in Malta, London and Hong Kong in the second half of 2025, a newer keyboard, the same mouse line, and for the first time a tournament PC whose main components the hardware partner has listed by name.
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