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The annual CES tech bonanza is over for another year, so I thought I’d put all of the big PC gaming announcements here in one convenient place. The big theme this year was, perhaps unsurprisingly, lots of new gaming laptops to help more people get things done while working from home, and this was facilitated in large part by the announcement of the Nvidia’s RTX 30 series moving to laptops, as well as several new mobile processors from Intel and AMD. Laptops weren’t the only big news from CES, however, so read on below to find our highlights from this year’s show.
Perhaps the biggest and most exciting CES announcement this year was the arrival of a new Nvidia RTX graphics card. Priced at $ 329, the RTX 3060 will come with a whopping 12GB of GDDR6 memory, which is 4GB more than the RTX 3060 Ti and RTX 3070. A strange decision, of course, but I’m intrigued to test it in practice. once it launches in late February. Whether it’s easier to buy than the rest of Nvidia’s RTX 30 series lineup is a guess, but it’s good to see the more affordable end of next-gen graphics cards starting to emerge, as fleeting as it is. they are real. store shelves.
Another big announcement from Nvidia’s press conference was the even more imminent arrival of the RTX 30 series laptops. The first models will arrive in late January and early February, and there are plenty of nifty laptops out there from Asus, Acer, Razer, Lenovo, MSI, Gigabyte and more to watch out for.
Along with significant improvements to gaming performance, another welcome trend this year is the introduction of multiple 2560 × 1440 laptops to make most of Nvidia’s new graphics chips. They don’t end there either, as most of the top 1440p models all also have 165Hz refresh rates. 1920 × 1080 laptops, on the other hand, are also pushed up to 360Hz, which gives us more choices than ever.
AMD mainly focused on the CPU side of its business during its keynote address at CES, announcing not only the world’s first 8-core processor for ultraportable laptops, but also its new Ryzen 5000 HX family of chips for gaming laptops. The latter will arrive in many of the RTX 30 laptops mentioned above, as the corresponding H series of Tiger Lake laptop processors from Intel still need a little more time in the oven ( indeed, the only H-series chips Intel announced this week were for ultraportable laptops, their H35 family, rather than their more traditional H and HK gaming chips).
However, the promise of more RDNA 2 GPUs for desktops and laptops arriving in the first half of this year was hidden behind AMD’s keynote address. They haven’t announced specific models or pricing information, but you can see in the image above that there are two GPUs on the right, which suggests we’ll see successors to some of the AMD’s existing RX 5000 graphics cards before the end of June. . The fact that one of them is a single fan GPU implies that it will likely be the RX 6500 and RX 6600 rather than the RX 6600 and RX 6700, but whatever they end up being, they will almost certainly be more mainstream cards than AMD’s. RX 6800 and RX 6800 XT high powered GPUs, and we hope to bring much needed competition to Nvidia’s growing RTX 3060 family of cards.
It’s only in the design stage for now, but Razer announced a really crazy gaming chair at CES this year with a fold-out 60in OLED display tucked away on the back. Codenamed Project Brooklyn, Razer calls it the ultimate entertainment powerhouse, and I actually quite agree with that idea. It’s certainly a lot more practical and user-friendly than the monstrous Acer Thronos armchair, for example, and I’m actually very excited to try it out for real whenever it hits production.
And if that wasn’t enough, Razer is also making a new smart face mask with high energy Metro 2033. Building on their work of making surgical masks for frontline workers last year, Razer has already put up a working prototype of Project Hazel and will hopefully be here much sooner than Project Brooklyn.
Along with an array of new gaming laptops, MSI has announced that it will be making its first SSDs this year, and that their initial specs are really great. With sequential read and write speeds of up to 7000MB / s and 6900MB / s, respectively, it appears to be a bit faster than Samsung’s 980 Pro and WD’s Black SN850, although we don’t know how its Random speeds hold until it is launched later in the year.
While Intel hasn’t given us more details on when their 11th Gen Rocket Lake processors might launch this year (all they said was they’re still on track for arrive before the end of March), we were well received. news on whether they will be backward compatible with their existing 400 series motherboards. Indeed, Asus has come out and announced that it will release a BIOS update for many of its Z490 and H470 cards in order to ensure they still support 11th gen Intel chips, which is a big relief for anyone who has upgraded to one of Intel’s 10th gen Comets. Lake CPUs last year.
Indeed, when Intel announced that Rocket Lake would come with a new 500 series motherboard chipset, I was concerned that Comet Lake owners would be forced to purchase a brand new card in order to take advantage of the new PCIe support. 4.0 from Rocket Lake. We’ll have to wait for more confirmation from other motherboard makers to see if this will be the case on all Z490 and H470 boards, but it’s a promising start nonetheless.