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7 CES 2021 Announcements Every PC Gamer Should Know About
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CES 2021 is almost officially over for this year, but over the past few days, it's given us our first glimpse of what's in store for the year ahead.
From the big names in PC gaming to real Cyberpunk RGB face masks, we weren't disappointed by the product announcements and prototypes from the show, despite the show being the first online digital show this year.
CES flew by in the blink of an eye. On Monday, Intel took the stage with their new announcements, including the upcoming Intel Rocket Lake processors. After that, on Tuesday, AMD and Nvidia went livestream with a host of announcements, including AMD Ryzen 5000 mobile chips and Nvidia RTX 30 series mobile GPUs.
It was easier than ever to miss important announcements with so many individual streams and press releases flying by. But don't worry, if you feel like the tech show has passed you by, you've come to the right place. Here are all the best tech from CES 2021.
AMD Ryzen 5000 Mobile Processors
AMD is bringing its highly successful Zen 3 architecture to the upcoming Ryzen 5000 mobile processors. From quad-core to octa-core chips, including low-power U-series and high-end H-series, AMD also brings something special for gamers with the HX series.
There are two HX series chips worth paying attention to: Ryzen 9 5980HX и Ryzen 9 5900HX. Equipped with eight cores and 16 threads, these chips can run at 4,8GHz and 4,6GHz respectively. This gives you a chip that AMD says will allow any high-end GPU to run the latest games.
It looks like Intel will have some tough competition in the mobile market in 2021, especially ahead of its Tiger Lake H-series chips later this year. The first laptops with the latest AMD processors will start shipping in February.
Intel Rocket Lake
With a 19 percent increase in IPC from the new Cypress Cove core, Intel's Rocket Lake chips are the biggest shake-up in the DNA of Intel desktop processors in half a century. They are built using smart CPUs from 10th generation Ice Lake mobile processors and an Xe GPU from 11th generation Tiger Lake chips, which together form a 14nm blend of two 10nm parts.
Rocket lake is designed to provide improved single-threaded performance over its predecessors, and perhaps even enough to be a hair's breadth ahead of the architecture. AMD Zen3. However, it will be forced to concede in multi-threaded performance, since even the top-end chip Core i9 11900K will ship with two smaller cores than its predecessor with eight cores and 16 threads. This is half of the 16-core Ryzen 9 5950X from AMD. Intel Rocket Lake is reported to arrive by March, and in the meantime, a bunch of compatible Z590 motherboards have already arrived.
Razer Project Hazel
Razer is constantly striving to outdo itself when it comes to prototypes and strange new partnerships. This year, as a sign of the times we live in, Razer has turned its attention to what can be worn at the moment: a face mask.
Project Hazel is an N95-class respirator that Razer calls "the smartest mask in the world."
With a transparent design, the mask is great for those who rely on lip reading in their daily lives. It also comes with a built-in voice amplifier to soften the muffledness of speech, and that's why it's equipped with RGB LEDs. The filters are replaceable and the fans are rechargeable - Razer seemed to have covered every possible feature you could imagine wearing a mask in 2077 - sorry, 2021.
A release date for Project Hazel is yet to be announced, but Razer is assuring us that it will be coming soon.
Nvidia RTX 30 Series Gaming Laptops
Having the fastest mobile processor in your gaming laptop isn't everything, you have to pair it with a serious GPU. The perfect time has come as Nvidia has just announced its lineup RTX 30 Series Mobile GPUs .
There are three new GPUs to look out for: RTX 3080, RTX 3070 и RTX 3060. Nvidia is also calling it the biggest gaming laptop launch ever, with more than 70 new gaming laptops crammed with the latest chips to launch in the coming months. Some will be on sale starting January 26th.
The main chip, the RTX 3080, will be available with up to 16GB of GDDR6 onboard memory.
With powerful new processors and GPUs, there's room to maneuver for even greater refresh rates and resolutions. Many laptop manufacturers are shipping 240hz, 1440p panels along with the coming wave of laptops, including some shiny new ones. laptops from Razer Blades .
Video card Nvidia RTX 3060 12 GB
Nvidia's latest desktop creation is the RTX 3060. This graphics card drops the price of entry into the Ampere generation to $329, which is noticeably cheaper than the $3060 RTX 399 Ti, but surprisingly comes with more memory. In fact, 12GB GDDR6.
We're eager to see cheaper options in the entry-level market right now, and in that regard, the RTX 3060 certainly seems like a great choice to us. However, the team has some concerns about how big the gap will be between this card and the RTX 2060, and even more so with the RTX 2060 Super. Whereas other RTX 30-series cards give their predecessors a good boost, the RTX 3060's main confirmed specs point to maybe a smaller jump between Ampere and Turing at the RTX 3060 pay level.
We'll have to see how this plays out closer to launch. However, the wait is not long: the RTX 3060 12GB will arrive at the end of February.
Asus ROG Flow X13 gaming laptop
The Asus ROG Flow X13, "the most exciting thing we've seen at CES 2021," is also exciting for the future of laptops in general.
The ROG machine is tiny. This diminutive 13-inch laptop is one such 2-in-1 device that fully switches to tablet mode. As a 2-in-1 owner, I can report that I at least never use tablet mode. Or actually a laptop in any other mode than the standard option.
My excitement about the Flow X13, which I'm sure is shared by most, is not because of its AMD Ryzen 5980XS chip (low power variant of the HX) or Nvidia GTX 1650 graphics, but because the ROG Flow X13 supports its own external GPU. It is also said to not suffer from any external bandwidth issues thanks to the use of a proprietary and terribly wide interface capable of 63Gbps. That's more than even Thunderbolt 4, but arguably takes up significantly more space than a Type-C port.
As someone who would like to get rid of the clutter and have one device for every occasion, I have to say that a compact laptop that can connect to an eGPU and an external monitor is something of a dream scenario. We hope this lives up to the CES hype.
LG 42" OLED panel
CES is nothing but a place for monitor announcements. This year we've seen the generous help of truly immersive monitors and faster, bigger panels, including around 144Hz 4K and glorious 240Hz QHD. This all sounds deliciously appealing to us PC gamers.
But if you've ever come across a stunning OLED display, you know why we want to get our hands on one for our desktops. So far, these have been giant TVs, but LG has just announced a line of OLED panels that scale up to 42 inches.
This is a promising sign that you will soon be able to connect your PC to a high-end TV and start playing games with a slight delay. With growing support for VRR, faster response times, and HDMI 2.1, the idea of playing PC games on your TV may not be as obnoxious as we used to think.
Soon we will have a chance to play in 4K on a stunning OLED screen.
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