The Best of CES 2024

PC Gamer Best of CES award
(Image credit: Future)

The dust has long since settled, the denizens of Las Vegas have gone back 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 kit being given the AI treatment across the show floor, whether or not it actually had anything to do with artificial intelligence, machine learning, or just a wee algorithm. 

But there were at least some interesting uses of the technology, and even one which could be useful in gaming outside of just faking up new frames. In gaming monitors, ostensibly to help you cheat. Yeah, it's a weird gaming tech world, eh?

There were also some great new GPUs, SSD tech, and processors, too. And we've even managed to have hands on with a bunch of the new hardware to come out of CES 2024, and I still think our awards went to the right people. 

Best gaming laptop of CES 2024

Razer Blade family

(Image credit: Razer)

1. Best gaming laptop of CES 2024

Razer Blade 16 OLED
The new Razer Blade 16 is being upgraded with a 240 Hz OLED screen as standard and as panel obsessives here on the PC Gamer hardware team it's hard for us not to see that as a wonderful thing. Sure, they're incredibly expensive devices anyways, so having it as the default screen should almost be a given, but it is a quite wonderful panel even if it is just a 2560 x 1600 display. Crucially it's still a 16:10 ratio, but now with a level of vibrancy and contrast we adore in laptop OLEDs.

Best gaming monitor of CES 2024

Alienware 32 AW3225QF

(Image credit: Alienware)

2. Best gaming monitor of CES 2024

Alienware AW3225QF
This is the gaming monitor we've all been waiting for: a proper 32-inch 4K OLED. I mean, we've enjoyed the ultrawide 34-inch screen that's been at the top of our best gaming monitor list, but its still pretty low pixel density is our only concern. But with this 240 Hz 32-incher you're getting both a lovely QD-OLED panel and the pixel density we're after. And with that high resolution and density there should be less of the font fringing that has blighted a lot of QD-OLEDs on the desktop. Here's hoping it comes with a glossy coating option, too.

Best graphics card of CES 2024

MSI RTX 4070 Ti Super graphics card

(Image credit: Future)

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 to actually utilise an entirely new class of GPU. Packing the AD103 of RTX 4080 fame into the new card not only gives it more cores, but it crucially also bumps up both the memory and memory bus compared to the non-Super version. Just don't get me started on how dumb it is having 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

AMD Ryzen 7 8700G CPU in socket

(Image credit: Future)

4. Best processor of CES 2024

AMD Ryzen 7 8700G
The latest AMD desktop APU takes one of our favourite ever mobile chips, the Ryzen 7 7840U, and turns it into a mighty desktop chip with the most powerful integrated graphics you'll find. In fact, it's so good you can legitimately build an affordable gaming PC with just the 8700G alone and not have to fork out for a graphics card to play at 1080p. As we found in the Ryzen 7 8700G review, however, its performance alongside a discrete GPU means that it's only worth it if you are going to build without a graphics card.

Best new gaming tech at CES 2024

Human and Nvidia ACE and Convai NPC conversations

(Image credit: Nvidia)

5. Best new gaming tech at CES 2024

Nvidia ACE with Convai
Jacob spent some time at CES casually chatting with some guy in a cyberpunk ramen bar, and it became the single thing that made me excited about AI in games. The technology allows for real-time conversation with in-game characters that can have a meaningful impact on the environment around them. Jacob tried to break it, obviously, but the AI ramen dude dealt with everything he could throw at it, and it made me convinced the future of NPCs has to be real-time AI.

Best SSD of CES 2024

Samsung 990 Evo SSD

(Image credit: Samsung)

6. Best SSD of CES 2024

Samsung 990 EVO
It might seem a weird choice to be picking a Gen5 SSD with half the bandwidth as the best of the CES storage tech on offer, but its hybrid solution to the problem of a paucity of PCIe 5.0 lanes in the latest motherboard platforms. Even if you stick a modern PCIe 4.0 SSD into a Gen5 socket you'll still take up a pair of PCIe 5.0 lanes, but the x2 Samsung 990 EVO will deliver the same theoretical bandwidth, but only on a pair of Gen5 lanes, leaving another two spare.

Most innovative use of AI at CES 2024

MSI MEG 321URX QD-OLED

(Image credit: MSI)

7. Most innovative use of AI at CES 2024

MSI MEG 321URX QD-OLED
OLED gaming monitors represented some of the biggest news at CES 2024, but there are still only a handful of actual OLED panels being dropped into modern gaming monitors. You have LG and you have Samsung, which MSI has used in its 32-inch 4K OLED display. Nothing innovative about that, you might say, and you'd be right, but the company has embedded a smart AI accelerator which is able to analyse a game being played on it to aid the user. The example is it monitoring the mini-map in League of Legends to help indicate to the user where opponents are coming from with an on-screen cue. Cheating? Maybe. Innovative? Oh yes.

Best product update of CES 2024

Asus ROG Zephyrus G14 at CES 2024.

(Image credit: Future)

8. Best product update of 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 do a tangible update to a product that has been rightly heralded as one of the best gaming laptops of the past few years. Yet that's exactly what Asus has done with its Zephyrus G14, our favourite 14-inch gaming laptop, giving it an entirely new chassis and entirely new feel. And all for the better. It's the device which impressed Jacob, our man in Sin City the most this year, and now he's got one in his hands good luck trying to prise it out of them.

Dave James
Editor-in-Chief, Hardware

Dave has been gaming since the days of Zaxxon and Lady Bug on the Colecovision, and code books for the Commodore Vic 20 (Death Race 2000!). He built his first gaming PC at the tender age of 16, and finally finished bug-fixing the Cyrix-based system around a year later. When he dropped it out of the window. He first started writing for Official PlayStation Magazine and Xbox World many decades ago, then moved onto PC Format full-time, then PC Gamer, TechRadar, and T3 among others. Now he's back, writing about the nightmarish graphics card market, CPUs with more cores than sense, gaming laptops hotter than the sun, and SSDs more capacious than a Cybertruck.

Read more
The CES 2025 logo, in the lobby of the Venetian Suites conference facility at the 2025 show with the crowds below.
The Best of CES 2025
PC Gamer Hardware Awards 2024 logo on a black background
PC Gamer Hardware Awards 2024: The winners in every category of PC gaming greatness from the past 12 months of tech
Asus TUF A14 gaming laptop on a blue background
I've tested the best graphics cards and CPUs of the year, and yet it's this affordable, unassuming little gaming laptop that captured my heart in 2024
The CES logo on display at the show.
CES 2025: From next-gen Nvidia GPUs to gaming laptops galore, here's everything we expect to see at January's show
Highest scoring hardware
PC Gamer's highest rated hardware favourites of 2024, plus five dishonorable mentions
Asus ROG Ally X gaming handheld at an event in Taipei, Taiwan.
The biggest winners and losers of 2024: Nvidia won over Wall Street but what hardware won PC Gamer's heart?
Latest in Hardware
A woman wearing a VR headset with dramatic, colourful lighting across the background
'World’s smallest LEDs' could lead to accurately lit screens with 127,000 pixels per inch and much more immersive VR
The NES themed 8BitDo Retro mechanical gaming keyboard on a blue background
I love the 8BitDo Retro C64 keyboard but I'd pick its cheaper NES-themed model near its lowest price ever during Amazon's Big Spring Sale
The snazzy red and black HyperX Cloud Alpha wireless headphones float in a teal void. The microphone is attached to the headset.
The best wireless gaming headset is now even better in the Amazon Big Spring Sale, boasting a more than $50 discount
A chip being held up in an Intel fab
Intel is reportedly 'working to finalize commitments from Nvidia' as a foundry partner, suggesting gaming potential for the 18A node
Amazon box
Don't panic! The 'Do Not Send Voice Recordings' option Amazon just removed was only used by 0.03% of customers and they can still have it
Digital generated image of people surrounded by interactive transparent and glowing panels with data. Visualising smart technology, blockchain and artificial intelligence
Now I shall demand the cookies! Proposed new browsing agreement turns the tables and lets users dictate terms to websites
Latest in Features
Sphene applauds in Final Fantasy 14's patch 7.2 story.
I'm not yelling 'we're so back!' yet, but Final Fantasy 14's patch 7.2 story could be the first sign the MMO is returning to what made it so critically-acclaimed
Several tight-wearing superheroes surge towards the camera in a heroic fashion in City of Heroes.
One year later, City of Heroes' officially recognized fan server has me praying it's the future of dead MMOs
Immortal Pillars expansion for Age of Mythology: Retold
Age of Mythology Retold's new Chinese pantheon expansion takes a bold stance on updating an old game: Just make good new stuff
Ragnarok Battle Offline
After punishing my graphics card with Monster Hunter Wilds, I've returned to the rock-solid frame rates of my old hunting grounds: Windows XP
Ghoul in sunglasses
I'm convinced being a ghoul in Fallout 76 is the best way to vibe in West Virginia, thanks to these powerful perk cards and my new true love: Radiation
Steel Hunters hands-on
Steel Hunters is like a more tactical Titanfall, but as an extraction shooter it's undermined by boring loot