Alienware isn't going to let rivals' small gaming laptops go unanswered. The brand has revealed the X14, its (and Dell's) thinnest gaming laptop yet. The 14-inch design uses a trick dual-torque element hinge and cooling upgrades to keep the design to a 0.57-inch thickness while including high-performance components, including a 12th-generation, 14-core Intel Core i7 and up to GeForce RTX 3060 graphics. It's even billed as the first 14-inch laptop to support both NVIDIA's G-Sync and Advanced Optimus graphics switching.

The 144Hz 1080p display isn't remarkable by itself, but all X14 models support Dolby Vision HDR. There's healthy expansion as well. You can configure the X14 with up to 32GB of (soldered-in) DDR5 memory and 2TB of SSD storage. You won't be hurting for connectivity between the two Thunderbolt 4 ports, USB-C, USB-A, HDMI 2.1 and a microSD card slot.

Alienware ships the X14 sometime this winter at a starting price of $1,799. The base trim will get you 16GB of RAM, RTX 3050 video and 256GB of storage.

There are compromises involved in cramming that hardware into a laptop slimmer than many ultraportables. We had early hands-on time with the Alienware X14, and we found the keyboard particularly cramped — including the WASD configuration you'll likely use with first-person shooters. It is a solid and relatively light (no more than 4.06lbs) machine given the components inside, though, so it's worth considering if you want a gaming rig that easily fits in your backpack.

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It wouldn't be CES without a deluge of new gaming laptops, and so far, the 2022 edition of the annual trade show has delivered. It should come as no surprise then that Razer took the opportunity to update its popular Blade 14, 15 and 17 models. The company hasn't redesigned the three laptops, but it has made a handful of tweaks. They all feature refreshed keyboards with "slightly larger" keys, a change Razer says it made with the "wellness" of users in mind. They also include a new hinge design that is thinner and enables better ventilation.

Razer

However, the highlight of these machines is their updated internals. All three will come standard with DDR5 RAM for the first time. It's also possible to configure them with NVIDIA's latest laptop flagship GPU, the RTX 3080 Ti. With 16GB of onboard GDDR6 memory, Razer claims it delivers better performance than a desktop Titan RTX. Another option you'll have is the RTX 3070 Ti. Razer says the GPU is up to 70 percent faster than the RTX 2070 Super NVIDIA shipped in 2020. The company also claims it can deliver 100 frames per second while rendering games at 1440p. 

The Blade 15 and 17 will also come with Intel's new 12th-generation Core H-series processors. Announced at CES, these use the same performance and efficient core design as their recently announced desktop counterparts. Those with money to spare can configure the Blade 15 and Blade 17 with the 14-core i9-12900H. Oh, and all the computers will come with Windows 11 pre-installed.

As you might imagine, the Blade 14 features the fewest improvements as the most recent addition to Razer's lineup. The 2022 model includes a new fingerprint-resistant coating and a 1080p IR webcam with full Windows Hello support. Internally, the computer has one of AMD's latest 6000 series processors, the Ryzen 9 6900HX, paired with 16GB of DDR5 RAM.

As for the Blade 15, it will come with a new optional UHD display. The highlights of this IPS panel include 100 percent DCI-P3 wide color gamut coverage and a 144Hz refresh rate, up from 60Hz on the 4K OLED Razer offered previously. Your other display options with the 2022 model are a 360Hz 1080p panel or a 240Hz 1440p screen.

Razer

Lastly, the Blade 17 gets some of the most practical upgrades. Razer has equipped its flagship with a higher capacity 82WHr battery. It also comes with eight speakers, up from four on the 2021 model. Last but not least, the Blade 17 will ship with a new 280W adapter that, thanks to its GaN circuitry, is about the size of a 180W power brick.

The Blade 14 will start at $2,000 when pre-orders open on February 10th through the Razer website and select retailers, with broader availability to follow later in the first quarter of 2022. Meanwhile, the Blade 15 and Blade 17 will start at $2,500 and $2,700, respectively, and will be available to pre-order beginning on January 25th.

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Companies like Razer, Alienware and Asus ROG have been offering laptops with RTX 3080 and 3070 GPUs inside for a while now, but over the summer NVIDIA launched a pair of upgraded desktop cards: the 3070 Ti and 3080 Ti. Now, the company is bringing the “Ti” brand over to laptops.

The 3080 Ti will be available in laptops priced $2,499 and above. NVIDIA says it’s faster than last generation’s Titan RTX desktop card, and will be able to play (unspecified) games with 1440p ultra settings at over 120 fps. It also features 16GB of GDDR6 clocked at “the fastest ever seen in a laptop.” Exact details beyond that haven’t been shared yet, but the first 3080 Ti laptops will be available in February, so we won’t have long till we find out exactly what they’re capable of.

The 3070 Ti will be available in laptops priced $1,499 and above. NVIDIA says this one is “70 percent faster than the RTX 2070 Super laptops,” which isn’t a particularly helpful figure but hey-ho. It’ll apparently be able to run 1440p games at ultra settings at 100 fps, and, again, will start appearing in laptops in February.

Finally, NVIDIA announced some new technologies for Max-Q laptops, including an AI CPU Optimizer which can control the frequencies and power draw of certain Intel and AMD "nex-gen" CPUs, Rapid Core Scaling which can turn off some GPU cores while boosting the frequencies of others for productivity tasks, and Battery Boost 2.0, which will tune both your game and your hardware to apparently improve gaming while on battery. NVIDIA claims that last one can increase your battery life by 70-percent, presumably at the expense of in-game performance.and fidelity.

Follow all of the latest news from CES 2022 right here!

It's CES season, and there are, inevitably, a bunch of new gaming laptops to check out. Dell has joined the party with a refreshed lineup of Alienware laptops, including the AMD Ryzen-powered M15 R7 and M17 R5.

You can select a Ryzen 6000-series CPUs to power the M17 R5. On the GPU front, you can have an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3050 Ti, 3060 or 30 Series laptop graphics card. If you'd prefer to go down the AMD route, you can equip the laptop with a Radeon RX 6700M or 6850M XT. RAM tops out at 64 GB of DDR5 memory, and you can have up to 4TB of NVMe M.2 SSD storage.

Dell

There are several display options, all of which include AMD Freesync and NVIDIA G-Sync support. Alienware's M series models support Dolby Vision and Dolby Atmos too. Among the keyboard options is one with mechanical CherryMX switches. The 17-inch laptop is a powerhouse, though it might not be the most travel-friendly gaming laptop around — it can weigh up to 3.3 kg (7.3 lbs).

The M15 R7 is a 15-inch laptop that supports the latest GeForce RTX 30-series GPUs. We're awaiting more details on the specs.

Alienware started using Ryzen chips in laptops last year after a 14-year gap in which it didn't ship any with AMD CPUs. You can expect to get your hands on the latest AMD-powered Alienware systems this spring. The M15 R7 starts at $1,499 and the M17 R5 starts at $1,599.

Dell hasn't announced any Intel-powered models yet. However, there's an Intel press conference at 1PM ET today.

Follow all of the latest news from CES 2022 right here!

It wouldn't be CES without new Chromebooks, and Acer has a new trio to announce — though two of them aren't expected to arrive until June of 2022. The most intriguing of them is a new version of the Chromebook Spin 513 (pictured above), one of Acer's mid-range options. While the company already sells a few different configurations of the Spin 513, this new model has a somewhat unusual processor on board. It's using MediaTek's eight-core Kompanio 1380 processor, coupled with up to 8GB of RAM and up to 128GB of storage. In the past, I've been reluctant to recommend Chromebooks without Intel processors, but I won't write this one off without testing it first. 

Assuming the processor holds up, there are some other things to like about the Chromebook Spin 513. This year's model has a 13.5-inch touchscreen with a 2,256 x 1,504 resolution; that's a 3:2 aspect ratio like the Chromebook Spin 713 I reviewed last year. The Spin 713 is an expensive Chromebook at $699, but the Spin 513 is priced at $599. That's not cheap, but I'm glad to see Acer put this 3:2 display on a less expensive option. As the name suggests, the Flip 513 has a 360-degree hinge so the laptop can be flipped around into tablet mode as well as "tent" mode for watching video. Unfortunately, we'll have to wait until June for this laptop to go on sale.

The other two new Acer Chromebooks are budget options, both priced at $299. The 2022 Chromebook 315 is a 15.6-inch laptop, and its large 1080p panel (touchscreen optional) is the main selling point here. Other specs are pretty standard for this price range: Intel Celeron or Pentium Silver processors, up to 8GB of RAM, 64GB or 128GB of storage and about 10 hours of battery life. The Chromebook 314, on the other hand, is essentially the same as the 315, it just has a smaller, 14-inch 1080p screen. The Chromebook 315 will be on sale this month in the US, but the 314 won't be available until June.

Follow all of the latest news from CES 2022 right here!

Have you ever looked at your mouse and thought "it's fine, but kind of a big fat waste of space?" Gaming accessory company XPG apparently did, because it's just unveiled a concept mouse for CES 2022 with a built-in high-speed SSD drive stuffed inside, Digital Trends has reported. 

The XPG Vault Gaming Mouse is a wired USB-C mouse that the company calls a "gaming library in the palm of your hand." The prototype model supports up to 1TB of memory that can run at a surprisingly fast 985 MB/s. The storage can be controlled by XPG's gaming software app. "Gaming Launcher software... promises to make your gaming libraries conveniently portable and [add] a higher level of game integration with XPG Prime Software Ecosystem," the company said.

It looks like a pretty normal mouse, though it'd require a pretty stout USB-C cable to support those kind of speeds. It's not the worst idea we've heard, because it gives you some high-speed storage while freeing up a USB slot that'd normally be taken by a wired mouse. XPG didn't mention the mouse's DPI or any other gaming specs. 

Mice with built-in USB storage aren't unheard of, though we haven't seen anything notable recently. Wild gadgets often pop up at CES, however, helping companies grab some attention and publicity. Aside from the prototype mouse, XPG also unveiled some products that could come to market next year including PCIe Gen5X SSDs, DDR5 DRAM and the XPG Wired/Wireless Alpha gaming mouse. 

Samsung has teased a PCIe 5.0 SSD showing that storage products should keep doubling in speed every few years, even while Moore's Law is decelerating. Designed for enterprise servers, the PM1743 SSD can hit read speeds of up to 13,000 MB/s and handle 2,500K input/output operations per second (IOPS) — nearly double what the best PCIe 4.0 NVMe drives can do. 

PCIe 5.0 supports up to 32 gigatransfers per second (GT/s), double that of PCIe 4.0. To harness that bandwidth, Samsung developed a proprietary controller and worked with Intel to test it. "Together, we have jointly resolved complicated technical issues encountered with PCIe 5.0 during this initial evaluation period," said Intel's Technology Initiatives Director Jim Pappas.

The SSD delivers sequential write speeds of 6,600 MB/s and a random write speed of 250K IOPS, again nearly doubling current specs. It also offers improved power efficiency of up to 30 percent. "This is expected to lower server and data center operating costs significantly, while also helping to reduce their carbon footprint," Samsung wrote. 

While PCIe 5.0 is now inevitable, the next version isn't far behind, either. The PCI Special Interest Group has already unveiled a PCI Express 6.0 specification that could hit up to a blistering 256GB per second across 16 lanes — twice as fast as PCIe 5.0 and four times quicker than the 4.0 spec. However, that format will need to use a new trick called Pulse Amplitude Modulation technology that can carry twice as much data as existing methods without the need to use ridiculously high frequencies.

Samsung is now sampling the PM1743 PCIe 5.0 SSD for select customers and has plans to mass produce it in the first quarter of 2022, with capacities ranging from 1.92 terabytes (TB) to 15.36TB. It's also expected to be the first PCIe 5.0 SSD with dual-port support, guaranteeing server operation when a connection to one port fails. The first customers are likely to be data centers, but such technology usually trickles down to consumers a year or so later — so plan accordingly if you have any 16K video editing projects or whatever coming up. 

LG is best known for productivity-oriented laptops and particularly, its lightweight Gram 17 — but not any serious gaming models. Now the company has revealed what it calls its "first gaming laptop" with some high-end specs. The 17-inch UltraGear 17G90Q model packs an 11th-generation Intel Tiger Lake H CPU, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 Max-Q graphics, up to 32GB of RAM and 1TB of storage.

It also comes with a 300 Hz 1080p IPS display, and should have pretty decent endurance for gaming or content creation with the 93Wh battery. There's a good selection of ports, including a USB 4 Gen 3x2 (Type C) with Thunderbolt 4, another USB-C 3.2 2x1, two USB 3.2 Gen 2x1, HDMI, microSD, headphone jack and RJ45. Other features include a power button fingerprint sensor and 1080p webcam. 

LG

It's got an aluminum case with an attractive grey/purple color scheme and is fairly slim for a 17-inch gaming laptop (21.4mm). It's decently lightweight at 5.82 pounds, though a bit heavy compared to MSI's 17-inch GS76 Stealth laptop, which is 5.4 pounds and has a bigger battery.

LG didn't reveal the key pricing, but it could be a good option for folks who like the LG brand and appreciate the understated styling. It's set to arrive in the US and South Korea starting in early 2022, and LG will reveal more details at CES 2022 on January 4th.

NVIDIA is once again reviving an old name in its graphics chip lineup, but this time it's for thoroughly modern technology. As AnandTechreports, the company has introduced an GeForce RTX 2050 laptop GPU that may sound like recycled low-end hardware, but is based on the same Ampere design found in the RTX 3050 series. The naming scheme is confusing, to put it mildly, but that does give you up-to-date ray tracing in a potentially more affordable package.

You'll have to settle for a 64-bit memory bus instead of the 3050's 128-bit pipe, and the boost clock stops at 1,477MHz versus 1,740MHz. However, you'll still get the same 2,048 CUDA cores and 4GB of GDDR6 memory, while peak power consumption drops to a much more reasonable 45W compared to the 80W of higher-end chips. This is partly meant for 'in-between' laptops that don't have the chassis space or batteries for RTX 30 GPUs.

The company has also revealed two entry-level chips, the MX550 and MX570, although it's shy on details beyond promises of more CUDA cores, faster memory and greater power efficiency than the MX450 they replace. The MX550 is based on the older Turing architecture, while the MX570 uses Ampere. Like with past MX chips, these are meant for thin-and-light portables where integrated graphics might not be good enough.

There's another issue beyond the branding: the release window. NVIDIA doesn't expect the RTX 2050 or new MX parts to reach shipping laptops until spring 2022. That's an usually long lead time, and suggests NVIDIA is announcing the GPUs now to clear the slate for CES in January. Whatever the reasoning, you'll have to be patient if you want a laptop with modern NVIDIA graphics but find RTX 3050-equipped systems beyond your reach.

Working with Intel, Dell has created a new laptop called Concept Luna with the aim of making future PCs easier to repair, reuse and recycle. Dell said that if it incorporated all the design ideas, it could reduce a computer's carbon footprint by up to 50 percent compared to current laptop models.

A key feature of Concept Luna is the redesigned components and a new, more efficient layout. To start with, the motherboard is 75 percent smaller at just 5,580 square millimeters and has a 20 percent lower component count. Everything is rearranged, with the motherboard close to the top cover to expose it to a larger cooling area. It's also separated from the battery charging unit in the base, allowing better passive cooling that could eliminate the need for a fan. 

Dell

The extra efficiencies also reduce power requirements, allowing the designers to use a smaller battery with deep-cycle cells that offer a "long charge that can be maintained across many years of use, increasing refurbishment and reuse beyond the first product life it services," Dell said. 

On top of making the design more power efficient, Dell designers used less energy-intensive materials that are easier to recycle. The aluminum body, for instance, was processed using hydro power and a more efficient stamped construction. Dell also reduced the number of screws by tenfold, "with just four needed to access internal components." That not only reduces material count, but repair time (to disassemble, repair and reassemble key components) by around 1.5 hours. 

Dell

Other features include a palm rest that's easy to repair and reuse, a keyboard mechanism that can be easily separated for replacement and recycling, and a bio-based printed circuit board (PCB) made with flax fiber in the base and water-soluble polymer as glue. "What's notable here is that the flax fiber replaces traditional plastic laminates... [and] the water-soluble polymer can 'dissolve,'" making for easier recycling. 

Concept Luna is far from the first green laptop concept. Framework, for example, recently demonstrated an easy-to-repair laptop with features like removable ports and components that are labeled so you can repair it yourself. 

Dell might not be the most-loved PC company in terms of customer service, but it frequently tops corporate charts for environmentally-friendly initiatives. Creating a concept that points the way to easy-to-fix, more recyclable PCs is a solid step toward reducing plastic waste and pollution in the PC industry. Now, Dell plans to take the best ideas from Concept Luna "and evaluate which have the greatest potential to scale across our product portfolio," the company wrote.