CES’s annual technology bonanza ended for another year, so I thought I’d put together all the important PC game announcements right here in one handy place. This year’s big topic was, perhaps unsurprisingly, many new gaming laptops to help more people get things done while working at home, and this was helped in large part by the announcement of Nvidia’s RTX 30 series switching to laptops, as well. like several new mobile processors from Intel and AMD. Laptops weren’t the only big news from CES, so read below to find our filleted highlights from this year’s show.
Undoubtedly, the biggest and most exciting CES announcement this year was the arrival of another new Nvidia RTX video card. Costing $ 329, the RTX 3060 will come with a huge 12 GB GDDR6 memory, which is 4 GB more than the RTX 3060 Ti and RTX 3070. A strange decision, to be sure, but I am intrigued to test a practical one time it will be released in late February. Whether it’s going to be easier to buy than the rest of the Nvidia RTX 30 series line, no one knows, but it’s nice to see the more affordable end of high-end graphics cards starting to appear, however fleeting they are in reality shelves of stores.
Another big announcement at the Nvidia 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 cool-looking laptops from Asus, Acer, Razer, Lenovo, MSI, Gigabyte and more to keep an eye on.
In addition to major improvements in gaming performance, another welcome trend this year is the introduction of several 2560 × 1440 laptops to make the majority of Nvidia’s new graphics chips. They don’t stop there, as many of the best 1440p models also have 165Hz refresh rates. 1920 × 1080 laptops, in turn, are also increasing to 360 Hz, giving us more options than ever before.
AMD focused primarily on the CPU side of its business during the CES keynote speech, announcing not only the world’s first 8-core CPU for ultraportable notebooks, but also its new Ryzen 5000 HX series chip family for notebooks for games. The latter will arrive on many of the RTX 30 laptops mentioned above, as Intel’s corresponding Tiger Lake H series CPUs still need a little more time in the oven (in fact, the only H series chips Intel announced this week. went to ultraportable laptops, his H35 family, instead of his more traditional H and HK game chips).
However, hidden at the end of AMD’s talk was the promise of more RDNA 2 GPUs arriving for desktops and laptops during the first half of this year. They haven’t announced any specific models or pricing information, but you can see in the image above that there are two GPUs on the right, suggesting that 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 are likely to be the RX 6500 and RX 6600 instead of RX 6600 and RX 6700, but whatever they turn out to be, they will almost certainly be more conventional cards than those on the AMD high power RX 6800 and RX 6800 XT GPUs, and we hope to bring some much needed competition to Nvidia’s growing family of RTX 3060 cards.
At the moment, it’s just in the concept stage, but Razer announced a really crazy gaming chair at CES this year that has a 60-inch foldable OLED screen hidden in the back. Code-named Brooklyn Project, Razer is calling it the ultimate entertainment powerhouse, and I’m actually quite on board with that idea. It’s definitely a lot more practical and user-friendly than the monstrous Acer Thronos chair, for example, and I’m really excited to really try it out whenever it really gets to production.
And if that wasn’t enough, Razer is also making a new smart face mask that has great Metro 2033 energy. Based on its work on manufacturing surgical masks for frontline employees last year, Razer has already put in a functional prototype Project Hazel is up and running and hopefully will be here long before Project Brooklyn.
In addition to a series of new gaming laptops, MSI has announced that it will make its first SSDs this year, and its initial specifications look quite accurate. With sequential read and write speeds reaching 7000 MB / s and 6900 MB / s respectively, it appears to be slightly faster than Samsung’s 980 Pro and WD’s Black SN850, although we don’t know how their random speeds hold on until it’s released later in the year.
Although Intel has not given us any further details on when its 11th generation Rocket Lake CPUs could be launched this year (all they said was that they are still on their way before the end of March), we received some welcome news whether they will be compatible with previous versions of your existing 400 series motherboards. In fact, Asus has announced that it will release a BIOS update for many of its Z490 and H470 cards to ensure that they still support Intel’s 11th generation chips, which is a big relief for anyone who upgraded to one of the 10th generation Comets from Intel Lake CPUs last year.
In fact, when Intel announced that Rocket Lake will be accompanied by a new 500 series motherboard chipset, I was concerned that Comet Lake owners would be forced to buy a new card to take advantage of the new PCIe 4.0 support from Rocket Lake. We will have to wait for further confirmation from other motherboard manufacturers to see if this will be the case on all Z490 and H470 boards, but it is a promising start nonetheless.