The annual technical bonanza CES is another year over, so I thought I’d gather all the major PC gaming announcements here in one convenient location. The big theme this year was, perhaps unsurprisingly, many new gaming laptops to help more people get things done while working from home, and this was helped in no small part by the announcement that the RTX 30 series from Nvidia made the switch to laptops, as well as several new mobile processors from Intel and AMD. Laptops weren’t the only big news from CES, though, so read on below to find our filmed highlights from this year’s show.
Arguably the biggest and most exciting announcement to come out of this year’s CES was the arrival of a new Nvidia RTX graphics card. The RTX 3060 costs $ 329 and comes with a whopping 12 GB of GDDR6 memory, which is 4 GB more than both the RTX 3060 Ti and the RTX 3070. A strange decision, of course, but I’m intrigued to get into field test it will be launched at the end of February. Whether or not it will be easier to buy than the rest of Nvidia’s RTX 30 series is a mystery, but it’s nice to see the more affordable end of the next-gen graphics cards popping up, however fleeting they may be store shelves.
Another big announcement from Nvidia’s press conference was the even more imminent arrival of RTX 30 series laptops. The first models will arrive in late January and early February, and there are plenty of handy laptops from Asus, Acer, Razer, Lenovo, MSI, Gigabyte, and more to keep an eye on.
In addition to a significant boost 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 top 1440p models all have a 165Hz refresh rate as well. 1920×1080 laptops, meanwhile, are also bumped up to 360Hz, giving us more choice than ever before.
AMD focused primarily on the CPU side of their business during their CES keynote speech, announcing not only the world’s first 8-core CPU for ultraportable laptops, but also their new family of Ryzen 5000 HX series chips for gaming laptops. . The latter will appear in many of the RTX 30 laptops mentioned above, as Intel’s corresponding H-series Tiger Lake laptop CPUs will need a little more time in the oven (indeed, the only H-series chips Intel will have this week announced were for ultraportable laptops, their H35 family, rather than their more traditional H and HK gaming chips).
Tucked away at the back of AMD’s keynote, however, was the promise that more RDNA 2 GPUs would come for both desktops and laptops in the first half of this year. They have not announced any specific models or pricing information, but you can see in the image above that there are two GPUs on the right, suggesting we will see successors to some of 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 they will likely be the RX 6500 and RX 6600 instead of RX 6600 and RX 6700, but whatever they become, it will almost certainly be more mainstream cards than that. from AMD. powerful RX 6800 and RX 6800 XT GPUs, and will hopefully bring some much-needed competition to Nvidia’s growing family of RTX 3060 cards.
It’s only in concept phase right now, but Razer announced a pretty crazy gaming chair at CES this year with a fold-out 60-inch OLED screen hidden in the back. Codenamed Project Brooklyn, Razer calls it the ultimate entertainment powerhouse, and I’m actually quite happy with this idea. It certainly looks a lot more practical and user-friendly than the monstrous Acer Thronos chair, for example, and I’m actually quite excited to try it out in real life when the hell it gets to the production stage.
And if that wasn’t enough, Razer is also making a new smart face mask with a big Metro 2033 energy. Building on their work last year making surgical masks for frontline workers, Razer has already commissioned a working Project Hazel prototype and will hopefully be here much earlier than Project Brooklyn.
In addition to a slew of new gaming laptops, MSI announced that they’ll be making their first SSDs this year, and their initial specs look pretty damn nippy. With sequential read and write speeds of 7000MB / s and 6900MB / s respectively, it appears to be a lot faster than Samsung’s 980 Pro and WD’s Black SN850, although we don’t know how its random speeds hold up until later in the year.
While Intel didn’t give us more details on when their 11th-gen Rocket Lake CPUs could launch this year (they just said they’re still on track to arrive before the end of March), we did get some welcome news on whether they’re going backwards will be compatible with their existing 400 series motherboards. Indeed, Asus has come out and said they will be releasing a BIOS update for many of their Z490 and H470 boards to ensure they still support Intel’s 11th generation chips, which is a great relief to anyone who has a upgraded to one of Intel’s 10th generation Comet Lake CPUs last year.
When Intel announced that Rocket Lake would be accompanied by a new 500 series motherboard chipset, I was concerned that Comet Lake owners would be forced to buy a whole new board to take advantage of the new PCIe 4.0- support from Rocket Lake. We’ll have to wait for more confirmation from other motherboard manufacturers to see if this will be the case for all Z490 and H470 boards, but it’s a very promising start nonetheless.