CES 2021: the main news for PC
Gaming laptops
Leaving rollable televisions, appliances and smartphones destined to cost a kidney with a leap, we find ourselves faced with a PC scene that, while bowing its head to laptops, did not miss announcements interesting. But it is not the case to neglect a generation of gaming laptops that promises a big leap forward in terms of efficiency, and therefore of noise, while increasing performance significantly. For the GeForce RTX 3060 Max-Q, in fact, we are talking about a higher power than a GeForce RTX 2080 Max-Q, therefore destined to be overwhelmed by the new RTX 3070 Max-Q and RTX 3080 Max-Q which respectively promise 1440p to much more. 60fps and the ability to play in 4K even on a laptop. Sure, the RTX 3080 has been advertised as a 1440p ultra-high framerate card, which is understandable given the mass of latest-generation games that put even a 3080 in trouble, but still it's ultra-quality and ray tracing on a laptop. $ 1999 MSRP.Not that such a price can be considered low, at least when compared with that of a desktop configuration, but we are talking about an extreme-end laptop that until recently would have cost a kidney. Today, however, we are faced with the rise of gaming laptops, also due to the work of NVIDIA that with the GeForce RTX 3000 Max-Q continues to work, together of course all the other players involved in the production of laptops, on the reduction of the prices of devices that need a lot of work on cooling, given their compact size.
But with the new Ryzen 5000 mobile, at the center of the AMD conference which anticipated more than double success compared to the last generation by estimating the arrival of at least 150 laptops with Zen 3 CPUs, and with the evolution and with the evolution of laptop GPUs it has become possible to reduce the size of laptops simply by optimizing existing cooling systems. With the Legion, for example, there is a decrease in surface area of 7%, in addition to the thinning of the chassis, which explains well the interest of the manufacturers, excluding Dell and MSI who have remained loyal to Intel, for the combination between the new technologies from AMD and NVIDIA.
On the other hand, reducing the work on dissipation also guarantees savings, a fundamental factor for products that aim to satisfy the huge public made up of people who use the PC both to play and to work both in the office and at home. Hence a market that strongly points towards laptops that can replace any desktop PC, cost the right and effectively become manageable laptops when needed. And it is an ever closer goal. Suffice it to say that the RTX 3060 Max-Q is designed for gaming laptops with a starting price of $ 999, whereas until recently there was the GTX 1650 that will survive by sliding into the $ 700 segment, however interesting since until yesterday it was populated with office solutions that were not particularly performing. The current situation is quite different, which seems destined to improve further with further innovations that will include the RDNA 2 GPUs for laptops, briefly mentioned during the AMD conference as arriving by mid-2021. But in the meantime Intel has Alienware and MSI on its side, ready to pass to the eleventh generation, and can count on Tiger Lake, with Intel Xe graphics architecture, which in this CES has made the lion's share thanks to ultraportable. In addition, CES 2021 saw the appearance in the form of a prototype in a desktop by Alder Lake, the new hybrid architecture, with high-performance cores flanked by different cores designed for efficiency, which in the second half of 2021 will radically renew the offer. of the company's desktop and laptop CPUs. Finally, the event held by Intel unveiled the existence of the Tiger Lake-H, a version designed for gaming, but always in an ultraportable perspective, which promises to run Valorant and Destiny 2 at 70 FPS in 1080p thanks to higher frequencies. , presumably also for the GPU, and thanks to an increase in CPU performance of 15% in single core and 40% in multi-core.
By the way it seems that 144Hz screens are about to almost become an entry level solution. Among the options of almost all the new gaming laptops we see 1080p screens from 300 Hz, variants 1440p at 165 Hz and 4K displays up to 120 Hz, as well as some 4K OLEDs from 60 Hz and the first 360 Hz panels for gaming notebooks . All among other things from high color fidelity in some cases even from a luminance of 500 nit, very high for small screens. Of course, for the base models we are talking about undoubtedly more modest features, but there is no doubt that the gaming laptop market is racing towards the future.
Desktop PCs
The gaming desktop, however, is destined to remain an important reality for an audience that looks at upgrades, extreme savings, assembly, overclocking or at the most possible, spending important figures also in terms of aesthetics, heatsinks and extras of every kind. It is no coincidence that this basin enjoys some attention that during the CES also manifested itself with the surprise announcement of MSI's high-speed SSDs that will start at the bersagliera with M.2 PCIe Gen4x4 gaming drives, with capacity up to 4 TB, capable of reaching 7000 MB / s in reading and 6900 MB / s in reading using the latest generation controllers.But the lion's share for the desktop market, during CES 2021, was undoubtedly made by the GeForce RTX 3060, the new Ampere card for the mid-range which, arriving at the end of February with support for the Resizeable BAR for the RTX 3000 series, it also looks to the professional sector by equipping 12 GB of memory against the 8 GB of the even more powerful RTX 3060 Ti. But this disparity, irrelevant in gaming for a GPU aiming at 1080p at 60fps with active ray tracing, has raised some perplexity in those who fear too much interest from miners who may be interested in a new generation solution that offers a lot of memory despite 329 dollars of price and 170W of consumption. The GPU shortage could therefore worsen with this model and some irritation is understandable, although the exaggerated tones for a video card in the midst of a pandemic are still avoidable, given the impossibility for many to grant themselves that upgrade they have been waiting for a long time. . But there has been a slight increase in availability and this is also true of the Ryzen 5000 desktops which will apparently remain the only retail option for some time.
AMD has in fact presented the Ryzen 7 5800 and Ryzen 9 5900, both characterized by excellent peak frequencies for non-X models, but for now it intends to distribute them only on OEM channels, binding them to the pre-assembled . The disappointment, however, is only partial. In fact, we expect that once the production problems have been solved, even the cheapest models of the excellent Ryzen 5000 will become available to everyone, perhaps right when the highly anticipated Ryzen 5 5600 arrives. But this is also the year of Rocket Lake , the latest 14-nanometer series from Intel that pending the transition to more advanced solutions seems to have decided to free itself from the challenge of brute power to focus on performance at stake and on catching up in terms of connectivity with PCIe 4.0. There is also talk of power and cooling improvements of the Z590 motherboards that showed up during CES, officially announcing the imminent arrival of the 11th generation of Intel processors.
New monitors
Moving on to monitors, companies like LG and Dell have focused on the professional side with 4K and ultra-wide 5120x2160 pixel OLED screens, but there has also been space for desktop gaming thanks to ASUS and MSI. The first one presented the ROG Swift PG32UQ, a 4K monitor with 144 Hz refresh and one millisecond MRPT response time which, equipped with dual HDMI 2.1 ports, also looks at the new generation consoles. But given the 32 inches and the G-Sync we see it well on a desk, where a high definition functional also to the graphic productivity is valued, which is undoubtedly among the cards of a screen that boasts a coverage of 160% of the sRGB color space and 98% of that DCI-P3. To this must then be added factory calibration aimed at minimizing the margin of error, Asus Extreme Low Motion Blur Sync and Variable Overdrive for a monitor that will undoubtedly have a substantial price, but given the limit of the HDR 600 it could point to a price. balanced.On the other hand, public interest, although the bulk of the numbers is still tied to 1080p, is finally moving from Full HD to higher resolutions, including the ultra-wide format for gaming and this January will welcome, also on the Italian market, the MSI MPG ARTYMIS 343CQR, a 21: 9 screen with 165 Hz refresh, 1000R radius of curvature and AI-enhanced Night Vision which is proposed at the decidedly interesting price of 699 euros. Cheaper, therefore, than the 1080p of the OCULUX NXG253R which, confirmed during the CES as arriving in the first quarter of the year, will cost 799 euros. But let's talk about a 360Hz IPS, one millisecond GTG response, proprietary G-Sync, and NVIDIA Reflex Latency Analyzer.
