The dust has long settled, the people of Las Vegas have returned 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 kits on the show floor getting the AI treatment whether it actually had anything to do with it or not. artificial intelligence, machine learning or just a small algorithm.
But there were at least some interesting applications of the technology, and even one that could be useful in gaming beyond spoofing new frames. In gaming monitors, supposedly to help you cheat. Yeah, it’s a weird world of gaming technology, huh?
There were also some great new GPUs, SSD technology and processors. And we even managed to get our hands on a bunch of new hardware coming 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
RazerBlade 16 OLED
The new Razer Blade 16 is upgraded with a 240Hz OLED display as standard, and as panel obsessives here at the PC Gamer hardware team, it’s hard for us not to see that as a great thing. Of course, they’re incredibly expensive devices anyway, so it should almost go without saying to have this as the default screen, but it’s a pretty gorgeous panel even if it’s only a 2560 x 1600 screen. Crucially, it’s still a ratio of 16:10, but now with a level of vibrancy and contrast that we love 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 true 32-inch 4K OLED. I mean, we enjoyed the ultra-wide 34-inch screen that topped our list of the best gaming monitors, but the still quite low pixel density is our only concern. But with this 240Hz 32-incher you get both a beautiful QD-OLED panel and the pixel density we’re looking for. And with that high resolution and density, there should be fewer font borders that have devastated many desktop QD OLEDs. I hope 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 that actually uses a completely new class of GPU. By putting the AD103, known from the RTX 4080, in the new card, it not only gets more cores, but also increases both the memory and the memory bus compared to the non-Super version. Just don’t get me started on how stupid it is to have 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 Ryzen7 8700G
The latest AMD desktop APU takes one of our favorite mobile chips ever, the Ryzen 7 7840U, and turns it into a powerful desktop chip with the most powerful integrated graphics you can find. In fact, it’s so good that you can legitimately build an affordable gaming PC with just the 8700G alone and not have to dig around for a graphics card to play at 1080p. However, as we discovered in the Ryzen 7 8700G review, the performance alongside a discrete GPU means it’s only worth it if you’re 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 chatting with a guy in a cyberpunk ramen bar, and it became the one thing that got me excited about AI in games. The technology enables real-time conversations with in-game characters that can have a meaningful impact on the environment around them. Jacob obviously tried to break it, but the AI ramen guy tackled everything he could think of, and it convinced me that the future of NPCs needs to be real-time AI.
Best SSD of CES 2024
6. Best SSD of CES 2024
Samsung 990 EVO
It may seem like an odd choice to pick a Gen5 SSD with half the bandwidth as the best of the CES storage tech on offer, but it’s a hybrid solution to the problem of a lack of PCIe 5.0 lanes on the latest motherboard platforms. Even if you plug a modern PCIe 4.0 SSD into a Gen5 socket you’re still taking up a few PCIe 5.0 lanes, but the x2 Samsung 990 EVO delivers the same theoretical bandwidth, but only on a few Gen5 lanes, leaving one more remained two spare.
Most Innovative Use of AI at CES 2024
7. Most Innovative Use of AI at CES 2024
MSI MEG321URX QD OLED
OLED gaming monitors represented some of the biggest news at CES 2024, but there are still only a handful of true OLED panels being put in modern gaming monitors. You’ve got LG and you’ve got Samsung, which has used MSI in its 32-inch 4K OLED display. There’s nothing innovative about that, you might say, and you’d be right, but the company has built in a smart AI accelerator that can analyze a game played on it to help the user. The example is that it monitors the mini-map in League of Legends to help the user indicate where opponents are coming from with an on-screen signal. To cheat? Maybe. Innovative? Oh yeah.
Best Product Update of CES 2024
8. Best Product Update from 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 make a tangible update to a product that has rightly been heralded as one of the best gaming laptops of recent years. Yet that’s exactly what Asus has done with its Zephyrus G14, our favorite 14-inch gaming laptop, giving it an all-new chassis and a whole new feel. And all for the better. It’s the device that impressed Jacob, our man in Sin City, the most this year, and now that he has one in his hands, good luck trying to get it out.