dave.james@futurenet.com (Dave James)
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The dust has long since settled, the denizens of Las Vegas have gone back to their quiet, innocent lives, and the Consumer Electronics Show is over for another year. But we’ve made our picks for the best kit to come out of the show and we’re presenting the winners below.
The event was always going to be wall-to-wall ‘AI this’ and ‘AI that’ and indeed there was a host of different kit being given the AI treatment across the show floor, whether or not it actually had anything to do with artificial intelligence, machine learning, or just a wee algorithm.
But there were at least some interesting uses of the technology, and even one which could be useful in gaming outside of just faking up new frames. In gaming monitors, ostensibly to help you cheat. Yeah, it’s a weird gaming tech world, eh?
There were also some great new GPUs, SSD tech, and processors, too. And we’ve even managed to have hands on with a bunch of the new hardware to come out of CES 2024, and I still think our awards went to the right people.
Best gaming laptop of CES 2024
1. Best gaming laptop of CES 2024
Razer Blade 16 OLED
The new Razer Blade 16 is being upgraded with a 240 Hz OLED screen as standard and as panel obsessives here on the PC Gamer hardware team it’s hard for us not to see that as a wonderful thing. Sure, they’re incredibly expensive devices anyways, so having it as the default screen should almost be a given, but it is a quite wonderful panel even if it is just a 2560 x 1600 display. Crucially it’s still a 16:10 ratio, but now with a level of vibrancy and contrast we adore in laptop OLEDs.
Best gaming monitor of CES 2024
2. Best gaming monitor of CES 2024
Alienware AW3225QF
This is the gaming monitor we’ve all been waiting for: a proper 32-inch 4K OLED. I mean, we’ve enjoyed the ultrawide 34-inch screen that’s been at the top of our best gaming monitor list, but its still pretty low pixel density is our only concern. But with this 240 Hz 32-incher you’re getting both a lovely QD-OLED panel and the pixel density we’re after. And with that high resolution and density there should be less of the font fringing that has blighted a lot of QD-OLEDs on the desktop. Here’s hoping it comes with a glossy coating option, too.
Best graphics card of CES 2024
3. Best graphics card of CES 2024
Nvidia RTX 4070 Ti Super
Of all the RTX 40-series Super cards, the RTX 4070 Ti Super is the only one to actually utilise an entirely new class of GPU. Packing the AD103 of RTX 4080 fame into the new card not only gives it more cores, but it crucially also bumps up both the memory and memory bus compared to the non-Super version. Just don’t get me started on how dumb it is having both the ‘Ti’ and ‘Super’ suffixes on the same card… or how flaky the MSI RTX 4070 Ti Super was at launch.
Best processor of CES 2024
4. Best processor of CES 2024
AMD Ryzen 7 8700G
The latest AMD desktop APU takes one of our favourite ever mobile chips, the Ryzen 7 7840U, and turns it into a mighty desktop chip with the most powerful integrated graphics you’ll find. In fact, it’s so good you can legitimately build an affordable gaming PC with just the 8700G alone and not have to fork out for a graphics card to play at 1080p. As we found in the Ryzen 7 8700G review, however, its performance alongside a discrete GPU means that it’s only worth it if you are going to build without a graphics card.
Best new gaming tech at CES 2024
5. Best new gaming tech at CES 2024
Nvidia ACE with Convai
Jacob spent some time at CES casually chatting with some guy in a cyberpunk ramen bar, and it became the single thing that made me excited about AI in games. The technology allows for real-time conversation with in-game characters that can have a meaningful impact on the environment around them. Jacob tried to break it, obviously, but the AI ramen dude dealt with everything he could throw at it, and it made me convinced the future of NPCs has to be real-time AI.
Best SSD of CES 2024
6. Best SSD of CES 2024
Samsung 990 EVO
It might seem a weird choice to be picking a Gen5 SSD with half the bandwidth as the best of the CES storage tech on offer, but its hybrid solution to the problem of a paucity of PCIe 5.0 lanes in the latest motherboard platforms. Even if you stick a modern PCIe 4.0 SSD into a Gen5 socket you’ll still take up a pair of PCIe 5.0 lanes, but the x2 Samsung 990 EVO will deliver the same theoretical bandwidth, but only on a pair of Gen5 lanes, leaving another two spare.
Most innovative use of AI at CES 2024
7. Most innovative use of AI at CES 2024
MSI MEG 321URX QD-OLED
OLED gaming monitors represented some of the biggest news at CES 2024, but there are still only a handful of actual OLED panels being dropped into modern gaming monitors. You have LG and you have Samsung, which MSI has used in its 32-inch 4K OLED display. Nothing innovative about that, you might say, and you’d be right, but the company has embedded a smart AI accelerator which is able to analyse a game being played on it to aid the user. The example is it monitoring the mini-map in League of Legends to help indicate to the user where opponents are coming from with an on-screen cue. Cheating? Maybe. Innovative? Oh yes.
Best product update of CES 2024
8. Best product update of CES 2024
Asus ROG Zephyrus G14
If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. That’s a common motto in product design in the PC industry, which is why Razer has essentially stuck with the same chassis design for the past 37 years. It takes a confident manufacturer to do a tangible update to a product that has been rightly heralded as one of the best gaming laptops of the past few years. Yet that’s exactly what Asus has done with its Zephyrus G14, our favourite 14-inch gaming laptop, giving it an entirely new chassis and entirely new feel. And all for the better. It’s the device which impressed Jacob, our man in Sin City the most this year, and now he’s got one in his hands good luck trying to prise it out of them.
