The annual CES technology boom is over for another year, so I thought I’d gather all the major PC gaming announcements here in one handy place. This year’s big topic was, perhaps surprisingly, a lot of new gaming laptops to help more people do things while working from home, and that was helped in large part by the announcement of the Nvidia RTX 30 series that moved to laptops. as well as several new Intel and AMD mobile processors. Laptops weren’t the only big news at CES, so read on below to find the highlights of this year’s program.
Undoubtedly, the biggest and most exciting announcement that came out of CES this year was the arrival of another new Nvidia RTX graphics card. Priced at $ 329, the RTX 3060 will feature a lot of 12GB GDDR6 memory, which is 4GB more than the RTX 3060 Ti and RTX 3070. A weird decision, of course, but I’m sorry intrigued to try it out in practice once it launches in late February. Everyone knows if it will be easier to buy than the rest of the RTX 30 range of the Nvidia series, but it’s good to see that the most affordable end of next-generation graphics cards is starting to appear, however ephemeral they may be. store shelves.
Another big announcement from Nvidia’s press conference was the even more imminent arrival of the 30 RTX series laptops. The first models will arrive in late January and early February, and there are plenty of ingenious-looking laptops, Asus, Acer, Razer, Lenovo, MSI, Gigabyte and more, to watch out for.
In addition to big boosts in gaming performance, another welcome trend this year is the introduction of several 2560 × 1440 laptops to make the most of Nvidia’s new graphics chips. They don’t stop there either, as many of the best 1440p models also have 165Hz refresh rates. 1920 × 1080 laptops, meanwhile, are also rising to 360 Hz, giving us more options than ever before.
AMD focused primarily on the CPU side of its business during its CES keynote address, announcing not only the world’s first 8-core CPU for ultraportable laptops, but also its new Ryzen 5000 series chip family. HX for gaming laptops. The latter will reach many of the RTX 30 laptops mentioned above, as Intel’s corresponding Tiger Lake laptop CPU series still need a little more time in the oven (in fact, the only H-series chips that Intel announced this week they were for ultraportable laptops, their H35 family, instead of the more traditional gaming chips H and HK).
However, hidden in the back of AMD’s main note was the promise that more RDNA 2 GPUs would arrive for both desktops and laptops during the first half of this year. They didn’t announce any specific models or pricing information, but in the image above you can see that there are two GPUs on the right, suggesting that we’ll see successors to some of AMD’s RX 5000 graphics cards before the end of June . The fact that one of them is a single fan GPU implies that they will probably be the RX 6500 and RX 6600 instead of RX 6600 and RX 6700, but whatever they are, they will surely be more traditional cards than those of AMD GPU RX 6800 and RX 6800 XT high power, and we hope they bring much-needed competition to Nvidia’s growing family of RTX 3060 cards.
For now, it’s just in the concept phase, but Razer announced this year a properly crazy gaming chair at CES that has a 60-inch drop-down OLED screen hidden behind it. Razer, with the name Project Brooklyn, they call it the ultimate entertainment engine, and I’m actually pretty much on board with that as an idea. It’s certainly a lot more practical and easy to use than the monstrous Acer Thronos chair, for example, and I’m actually very excited to really try it every time the devil reaches the production stage.
And if that wasn’t enough, Razer is also making a new smart mask that has a high-energy Metro 2033. Building on its job of making surgical masks for front-line workers last year, Razer already has a prototype of Project Hazel in operation, and hopefully it will be here long before Project Brooklyn.
In addition to a number of new gaming laptops, MSI announced that they will be making their first SSDs this year and their initial specifications look pretty damn good. With sequential read and write speeds of 7000 MB / s and 6900 MB / s respectively, it seems to be quite a bit faster than Samsung’s 980 Pro and WD’s Black SN850, though we won’t know how their random speeds are maintained until do not launch later. the year.
While Intel didn’t give us more details on when they could upgrade their 11th-generation Rocket Lake CPUs this year (all they said was that they’re still on track to arrive before the end of March), we were welcomed news about whether they will be compatible with existing 400 series motherboards. In fact, Asus has come out and said that it will release a BIOS update for many of its Z490 and H470 motherboards to make sure that they still support 11th generation Intel chips, which is a great relief for anyone upgrading to one of Intel’s 10th generation kits. Lake CPU last year.
In fact, when Intel announced that Rocket Lake will be accompanied by a new 500 series motherboard chipset, I was worried that Comet Lake owners would be forced to buy a whole new board to take advantage of the new PCIe 4.0 support of Rocket Lake. We’ll have to wait for further confirmations from other motherboard manufacturers to see if this will be the case on all Z490 and H470 boards, but it’s a promising start.