The Stand-Out Laptops of CES 2021
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Image: Joanna Neliu/Gizmodo, MSI, Acer, Asus, HP, Lenovo, Razer
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It was definitely strange not being able to hold, type on, or touch the brand new laptop screens at CES as we would have in pre-covid times. There’s only so much you can tell about a product you only see or read about online, so that tangibility is an absolute necessity to figuring out what a laptop is all about. (Some benchmarking would be nice, too.) Yet as we saw, it’s entirely possible to stand out with just a hardware spec list, new features, or an interesting design.
Asus brought
fire to this year s show, with a seemingly unending cavalcade of gaming laptops, monitors, motherboards and peripherals. For me though, the highlight of their offerings was the ROG Flow X13, a diminutive 13-inch gaming laptop with three (!!) graphics cards. You can choose between integrated Vega graphics from the Ryzen 5980HS processor, a discrete GTX 1650 GPU and a tiny external RTX 3080 graphics card.
That last option is only available if you pick up the 2021 ROG XG Mobile enclosure, doubling the price, but it should unlock a ridiculous amount of gaming performance in an incredibly compact design - and the enclosure also powers the laptop and provides a ton of extra USB ports for peripherals while it s connected. Not bad for something smaller than the average gaming laptop power brick.