CES 2022 came and went and due to the damnable pandemic it was once again a mainly virtual conference.
After Nvidia and AMD kicked things off announcing new RTX GPU SKUs in the 30 series family and new Ryzen 6000 laptop CPUs respectively, Gigabyte held their conference. To say that the conference was pared down is an understatement.
It started off with an exciting CGI opening and rolled straight into new product announcements.
First up was the AORUS 17 gaming laptop. This new flagship will sport Intel’s Alderlake CPUs which while power hungry, are more efficient with their Performance Cores for single threaded high intensity workloads like gaming that uses a single core and the Efficiency Cores for multi threaded workloads that don’t require as much power. Helping to push the framerates you can spec the system with either an RTX 3070Ti or 3080Ti. GPUs with claimed performance better than an RTX 2070 Super by 70% and a RTX Titan respectively. If accurate, it won’t matter that these are MaxQ variants, slightly watered down from the desktop counterparts to reduce power consumption and thermals.
This laptop will need that RTX 30 series GPU power because it’ll sport a 360Hz panel. Resolution wasn’t revealed at the time but I would assume it is a 1080p panel and possibly even a 1440p one. (Update: It is indeed 1080p)
The panel is a 17” monster squeezed into a 15” chassis due to the bezel-less design that is now common across the industry.
Next up was the creator focused Aero 16. Also sporting an Alderlake CPU and RTX 30 series cards, this will be a powerhouse for creators especially because it will continue to provide 4K visuals via its OLED panel much like it’s previous generation version. This is the first laptop to be certified by both X-Rite and Pantone and with a world first DELTA-E <1 rating. The OLED is HDR500 certified but the optional AMOLED display promises a higher HDR certification.
The final product launch was basically a TV without the TV tuner. The Gigabyte S55U is a 55’ UHD monitor able to run at 120Hz. It even sports a PC-less mode that will allow you to watch Netflix and load other apps. Basically a smart “TV”, yeah. Supporting Dolby Vision and Atmos this “monitor” will be perfect for big screen gaming particularly console gaming as it supports HDMI 2.1, required to play console games at 120Hz.
And that was it. Three products across 3 categories. I am sure that there will be more SKUs announced for lower spec models, but it was a bit strange to have a 3 product conference presentation. What was on display is interesting though and shows where CES was going this year. It’s more of an iteration and product refresh year than brand new groundbreaking products so far, but even then, it was exciting.
Gamers also need to take into account that there’s still the ongoing supply chain crisis which makes anything more far too risky. Kudos to Gigabyte for still delivering some great products for us to gawk at at CES and we hope that they showcase more cool tech in the near future.
