CES 2018: Year of amazing tech and gadgets

Announcements that made an impact

It’s that time of the year again when us tech freaks get giddy with anticipation as we see what the year ahead holds in store for us in terms of all the transistor induced goodness that the companies throw at us. That’s right, it’s time for the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) 2018. As has been the trend of years past, our favourite companies are showing off their latest wow factor goodies one after the other leaving our jaws to drag along the floor as we peruse what each of them has to offer.

Here are some of the announcements that will definitely leave you, the gamer, on the edge of your seat, unable to wait till these technological monstrosities hit the store shelves near you. NVIDIA is no alien to innovation and has consistently managed to wow us via their partner brands year in year out with some tech or the other, this year, is definitely the year of the displays. In conjunction with Acer, ASUS and HP, NVIDIA has unveiled the new Big Format Gaming Display. The new BFGDs are 65 inch, 4K 120Hz IPS panels with a built in NVIDIA Shield. Let that sink in. You now have a display which can double as a pretty capable gaming machine in and of itself along with drive your favourite games in the glorious 4K master race provided you have beefy enough hardware.

Next up we have an exciting announcement from Team Red, a.k.a. AMD. While intel is going through the whole Meltdown debacle, and NVIDIA is going large with the BFGD, AMD is going small. They have laid down the launch map for their CPUs for the year and the most exciting bit of news is that a Ryzen refresh is coming in April 2018. Still on the AM4 socket, AMD has announced Ryzen 2.0, these CPUs are going to be on a 12 nm dye and promise on bringing more improvements to IPC along with clock speeds and thermals. This is accompanied by a new motherboard line as well, namely the X470 series of motherboards. Gigabyte teased their top-end motherboard for this series and they feature actual physical heat sinks for the VRM, something that is going to lend itself immensely to lowering temperatures on the new systems sporting these awesome motherboards.

CES 2018 goes over the top

Every year CES gives us tech that we daydream about, along with some that fall a little short of the mark, either because they are too ambitious and you know that it’s not going to be worth the while or money, or it just doesn’t resonate with your personal taste. Well, since we have the amazing out of the way opportunity, here’s what didn’t light up our eyes with excitement at this year’s Consumer Electronics Show.

Samsung’s ‘The Wall’. Again, not one for subtlety, the wall is a 146 inch TV, yes, it’s quite literally a wall and features a new display panel technology called microLED which it claims is far superior to OLED. While the TV is impressive, it’s limited by, well, practicality, however, I am curious to see how the new display panel technology evolves.

For those of you who are fans of gaming peripherals that resemble transformers, well Mad Catz is back after going bankrupt with a range of new hardware that includes a new wireless RAT Air mouse, a Strike 4 keyboard and Freq 4 Gaming headset. Since my preferences in peripherals are less ‘futuristic’ I have never much taken to MAD Catz’s design philosophy, however, for those of you missing the ultra-robotic and futuristic design language, get hyped!

And lastly we have HTC. When the VIVE was announced a few years ago, it was all the rage. However, now, a couple of years into its life, the whole VR sector in terms of gaming has been a little underwhelming. This has been primarily due to the extremely high cost of entry for the new tech, with the device itself along with the hardware required to drive it properly being insanely expensive, as well as a lack of a variety in the games on offer for the platform. While people who have invested in VR and more specifically in the VIVE, will be thrilled to hear that the device is set to receive a whopping 78 per cent increase in resolution, to those who don’t care about or can’t afford VR (which is a significant share of the gaming audience) this news will definitely be falling on deaf ears.