It was a big show by Big Silicon at the (mostly virtual) CES 2022. Desktop and mobile CPUs and GPUs took center stage; these core bits will shape how your PC looks, runs, and feels in the new year.
There’s no better time to be a tech enthusiast than the week of CES (except, perhaps, the week of the Computex show in Taipei). Excitement is in the air, with powerful new PCs and core components being announced from dozens of companies. This year, we got to see the unveiling of Nvidia’s presumptive most powerful consumer graphics card to date (even if just for a momentary tease), alongside AMD’s newest CPU, which is poised to change the game for gamers, and so much more.
It wasn’t just desktop components. Both AMD and Intel also pushed out new lines of mobile processors that will soon dominate the laptop market. All of the major OEMs announced in tandem laptops that will incorporate these CPUs, and you can see lots more about those by checking out our Best Laptops of CES 2022 roundup.
If you’re just now trying to get caught up on all the new hardware coming out of CES, then you’ve come to the right place. We’ve lassoed up the best PC components and desktop gear that we saw during the show. Whether you are upgrading a PC, building one, or shopping for a premade system, this is the exciting new hardware that will factor into your 2022. —Michael Justin Allen Sexton
HP’s Omen 45L is one of the most powerful gaming desktops that we’ve reviewed to date, packing Intel’s recent Core i9-12900K and Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 3090 graphics card. Though the latter may soon be dethroned as Nvidia’s fastest by the GeForce RTX 3090 Ti, it’s as good as cards get on the market at the moment…if you can find one! Buying one in the Omen 45L may be your best bet, and all that elite hardware taken together makes this system a powerhouse of gaming potential.
This all comes loaded inside of an imposing case that employs a unique design, housing up to a 360mm liquid cooling radiator outside of the main compartment positioned in what HP calls a «Cryo Chamber» for additional airflow and cooling potential. Your wallet (and your significant other) probably won’t be happy, but if you’re looking for a PC with just about the best hardware you can buy and don’t want to build it yourself (or deal with component scalpers), the Omen 45L is a tantalizing option. (Check out our full review of the HP Omen 45L.) —MJAS
HP touts its new Z2 Mini G9 as “the world’s most powerful mini workstation.” We’ll need to test it first before we can back up that assertion, but we can’t deny that it certainly is “mini” and that it should be pretty doggone powerful.
The system has a total volume of under 3 liters and comes equipped with unlocked Intel 12th Generation (“Alder Lake”) Core vPro processors. The system also features support for DDR5 RAM, a PCI Express Gen 4 SSD, and a compact Nvidia GeForce RTX graphics card, which is something we rarely see in a low-profile form factor. If it’s anything like the 2020 Z2 Mini G5 workstation we reviewed, then it should prove to be a powerful little system indeed. (Read more about the HP Z2 Mini G9 here.) —MJAS
Dust is no friend to your desktop PC, but neither are overheating innards. Proper ventilation is a must if you want to avoid the latter, and CyberPower PC has found a unique way of letting massive amounts of air flow through one of its cases without just poking it full of holes. At the same time, it has turned it into a funky, vaguely menacing work of PC chassis art.
The CyberPower Kinetic Series Case makes use of a unique front panel that’s divided into an array of miniature, motorized triangular panels controlled by a heat sensor. When the system is operating relatively cool, this sensor will clam up the front panel to keep airflow light (and dust tamped down). As the system heats up, the front triangles will fold open and permit significantly more air to flow through. The 18 mechanized vents over the front panel open and close individually, as the system responds to the rising or falling temperature inside.
Is it a practical approach to handling airflow? Who knows! Does it look really cool? Uh, heck yeah. (Read more about the CyberPower Kinetic case here.) —MJAS
The Ryzen 7 5800X3D is the first AM4 CPU to employ AMD’s 3D V-Cache technology, which first debuted on AMD’s EPYC processors. This new design adds a second silicon die to the processor package that’s all cache and gives the CPU a massive 64MB last-level cache (LLC). In certain scenarios, this can lead to a performance boost, and it’s purported to be particularly effective in some game titles. AMD claims the Ryzen 7 5800X3D, which is coming in the spring, will handily outperform its Ryzen 9 5900X in many games and should hold an edge in select titles even over Intel’s top-end 12th Generation “Alder Lake” chip, the Core i9-12900K.
The Ryzen 7 5800X3D also gives us a taste of what we can expect to see in the second half of this year, when AMD launches its Ryzen 7000 processors based on its new Zen 4 architecture (also teased at CES 2022), which will take advantage of 3D V-Cache technology, too. (Read more about the Ryzen 7 5800X3D and upcoming Zen 4 processors.) —MJAS
2022 wouldn’t start properly without an Nvidia CES keynote and a classic «Here’s one more thing!» This year, it was our first look at the company’s upcoming flagship entry into the wildly popular (many would argue too popular) GeForce RTX 30 Series of discrete desktop GPUs: the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3090 Ti Founders Edition.
We didn’t learn a whole lot about the card aside from a few scant specs (which put it a few percentage points ahead of the GeForce RTX 3090 in terms of on-paper TFLOPs)—well, and the fact that it exists, period. But in a world hungering for any GPU it can get its hands on, grabby fingers are waiting.
We expect to hear more about the card in the coming months, including price points, release dates, and potential clues about what the stock situation might look like leading up to launch. Get your trigger finger flexing (to beat the buying bots) and your bank balance limbered up (because it won’t be cheap). (Read more about Nvidia CES 2022 graphics announcements.) —Chris Stobing
It’s been a while since we’ve seen any new graphics cards launched for under $300, let alone $200. And in a time when the available supply of discrete cards is more strained than ever, announcements like the AMD Radeon RX 6500 XT are a desert oasis.
No, it won’t be the most powerful GPU, nor an evolutionary one. But at this point, the Radeon RX 6500 XT, which will appear later this month from a host of AMD card partners, gets points in our book just for existing at the price it does. (We’ll see how that pricing dynamic shakes out when it hits the street and etailers, though.) Gamers who play at 1080p aren’t exactly starved for choice these days—just for available stock!—so any card family that augments the existing supply hopefully eases the situation for everyone, up and down the chain.
The RX 6500 XT launches on Jan. 19 at a $199 MSRP. We’ll see how long that dream of an affordable, accessible 1080p card lasts after launch: a day, an hour, a minute? (Find out more about the RX 6500 XT and AMD’s new Radeon Super Resolution tech.) —CS
Concept Polaris is Alienware’s second take on the external graphics card market. The company’s original Graphics Amplifier eGPU incorporated a full-size desktop power supply. It also relied on a proprietary connection that significantly limited its usefulness to a handful of select Alienware systems.
Concept Polaris is radically different, with external power adapters, a Thunderbolt 4 interface, and a significantly smaller overall build. The biggest “whoa,” though? The device also incorporates liquid cooling for the graphics card inside of the eGPU. Concept Polaris is certainly an interesting device, but it also has some design elements we expect to see change before anything like it might ever hit the street.
It remains to be seen what, if any, parts of the design will come to fruition. But any innovation in the quirky, largely moribund eGPU market is well worth a high-five. (Read more about Alienware’s Concept Polaris eGPU.) —MJAS
AMD’s newest generation of mobile processors, the Ryzen 6000 series, is the company’s latest effort to beat Intel and Apple for the best laptop chips. And they’re serious contenders: AMD is tapping its access to partner TSMC’s 6-nanometer (6nm) manufacturing process, which can pack more transistors onto the silicon than previous processes. As a result, the Ryzen 6000 series can deliver on average, according to AMD, “1.3x” faster performance over the 7nm Ryzen 5000 series.
The Ryzen 6000 series will span 20 different chip versions, according to AMD’s CES keynote. But for now, the company is revealing specs for only 10, which will feature either six cores and 12 threads, or eight cores and 16 threads. Eight of the newly announced chips, dubbed the H-Series, will focus on more-powerful laptops meant for gamers and digital content creators. The other two, part of the U-Series, will be devoted to thin-and-light laptop designs.
The most powerful chips in the Ryzen 6000 series can now hit 5GHz in boost clock speeds. Other notable improvements include support for DDR5 RAM, Wi-Fi 6E, HDMI 2.1, and USB 4. Notebooks built around the new processors can also last up to 24 hours on a single charge, AMD says, which should help you avoid that frustrating frequent search for an outlet whether you’re working from home or crunch-timing it at the airport. (Read more about AMD’s Ryzen 6000 mobile processors.) —Tom Brant
Intel’s first 12th Generation processors debuted late last year for desktop PCs (and indeed, Intel just expanded that line at CES 2022). But they are now coming to laptops, and we think the impact of their design could be greater there than on the desktop. The chips use Intel’s new Performance Hybrid architecture, grouping cores into two new categories: Performance cores (P-cores) and Efficiency cores (E-cores). The P-cores are designed to deliver maximum performance, with higher clock speeds and multi-threaded processing. The more energy-efficient E-cores, on the other hand, are single-thread only and will take on less-demanding loads and tasks when your system needs to prioritize one over the other, or when processing demands are simply low and energy savings is an option.
The principal improvement is 10% to 15% better performance per watt, but Intel is promising great things from this seemingly modest efficiency gain. Among them: The new CPU family is so flexible that it’s as at home powering thin-and-light laptops as it is hulking gaming rigs.
In addition to the new core architecture improvements, Alder Lake also brings easier access to Intel’s vPro remote management technology, which until now had mostly been limited to special processor SKUs intended for high-end corporate PCs. Now, Intel is expanding the vPro family with two new platforms available on most of the eight SKUs announced at CES: vPro Enterprise, built for the larger scale of today’s large and often global workforce, and vPro Essentials, which is tailored to small businesses that may not need the scalability of regular vPro, but still want to offer premium connectivity and support to their teams. (Read more about Intel’s 12th Gen Alder Lake mobile CPUs here.) —TB
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