The annual CES technical bonus ended another year, so I thought I’d fill in all the important PC game announcements right here in one handy location. This year’s big theme was probably surprisingly a lot of new gaming laptops, to help more people do things while working from home, and this was helped a little by the series’ announcement. RTX 30 from Nvidia switching to laptops, as well as some new mobile processors from Intel and AMD. However, laptops weren’t the only big news from CES, so read on below to find the highlights of this year’s show.
Probably the biggest and most interesting announcement that came out of CES this year was the arrival of another Nvidia RTX graphics card. Priced at $ 329, the RTX 3060 will come with a massive 12 GB GDDR6 memory, which is 4 GB longer than the RTX 3060 Ti and RTX 3070. A strange decision, for sure, but one that intrigues me to test in practice once launched at the end of February. Whether it’s easier to buy than the rest of the Nvidia RTX 30 range, anyone can guess, but it’s good to see the more accessible end of state-of-the-art graphics cards starting to appear, no matter how ephemeral store shelves are.
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 sleek looking laptops from Asus, Acer , Razer, Lenovo, MSI, Gigabyte and many more to keep an eye on.
In addition to the big increases in gaming performance, another welcome trend this year is the introduction of more 2560 × 1440 laptops to make the latest Nvidia graphics chips. They don’t stop here either, as many of the early 1440p models all have 165Hz refresh rates. Meanwhile, 1920 × 1080 laptops are also growing up to 360Hz, giving us more options than ever.
AMD focused primarily on the CPU side of their business during the CES keynote address, announcing not only the world’s first 8-core processor for ultraportable laptops, but also their new family of Ryzen 5000 HX series chips for gaming laptops. The latter will reach many of the RTX 30 laptops mentioned above, as the corresponding H-series CPUs of Tiger Lake laptops still need a little more time in the oven (indeed, the only chips in the series The Hs Intel announced this week were for ultraportable laptops, their H35 family, rather than the traditional H and HK gaming chips).
However, hidden behind AMD’s keynote speech was the promise that more RDNA 2 GPUs would arrive for both desktops and laptops in the first half of this year. They have not announced any specific model 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 existing AMD 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 RX 6500 and RX 6600, rather than RX 6600 and RX 6700, but whatever they are will certainly be more table cards. than the high-power AMD RX 6800 and RX 6800 XT GPUs and hopefully will bring much-needed competition to Nvidia’s growing family of RTX 3060 cards.
It’s just in the concept stage right now, but Razer has announced this year a crazy gaming chair accordingly at CES, which has a 60-inch foldable OLED display hidden behind it. Codenamed Project Brooklyn, Razer calls it the ultimate entertainment power, and in fact I’m pretty much on board with that as an idea. It’s definitely a lot more practical and easier to use than the monstrous Acer Thronos chair, for example, and I’m actually quite excited to really try it whenever the hell it gets to the production stage.
And if that wasn’t enough, Razer is also making a new high-energy smart face mask Metro 2033. Based on their work making surgical masks for front-line workers last year, Razer has has already received a working prototype of the Hazel Project and will hopefully be here sooner than the Brooklyn Project.
In addition to a number of new gaming laptops, MSI has announced that they will produce the first SSDs this year, and their initial specifications look quite nice. With sequential read and write speeds reaching 7000MB / s and 6900MB / s, respectively, it seems to be quite faster than WD’s Samsung 980 Pro and Black SN850, although we won’t know how to maintain random speed until it is released again. late in the year.
While Intel has not given us more details on when their 11th-generation Rocket Lake processors might rise this year (all they have said is that they are still on way to get there before the end of March), I received a receiving news about whether they will be back compatible with existing 400 series motherboards. Indeed, Asus has come out and said it will release a BIOS update for many of the boards. their Z490 and H470 to make sure they still support 11th-generation Intel chips, which is a great relief for anyone who has switched to one of Intel’s 10th-generation comets. Lake CPUs last year.
Indeed, when Intel announced that Rocket Lake would be accompanied by a new chipset for the 500 Series motherboard, I was worried that Comet Lake owners would be forced to buy a brand new board to take advantage of the new PCIe support. 4.0 to Rocket Lake. We will have to wait for more confirmations from other motherboard manufacturers to see if this will be the case for all Z490 and H470 boards, but it is still a promising start.