CES 2012 Gaming Laptop Roundup

Your humble correspondent it unfortunately not a CES correspondent this year, but the least we can do here is to round up the biggest gaming laptop news to comes out of the #1 consumer electronics trade show.

Considering that Intel’s next-gen Ivy Bridge platform is still months away, and that the 28nm GPUs have yet to materialize from either AMD or Nvidia, there are no major news to report in terms of new hardware. One exception though, regarding Intel’s Ivy Bridge, is that the rumor about the new and improved integrated graphics part appears to be well founded. After a bit of a brouhaha where Intel was caught “simulating” the graphics capabilities of an Ivy Bridge ultrabook, Anand Lal Shimpi managed to get a actual demonstration of a tiny laptop running F1 2011 in DX11 mode:

While F1 2011 isn’t the most demanding game around, being able to run it on a tiny laptop with a mere IGP is really quite impressive.

Another somewhat newsworthy item is the one pictured above the header; it’s the revised version of Origin PC’s EON 17-s. This laptop, as well as the 15.6-inch EON 15-s have both received a facelift (at least on the lid, there are no big hardware changes from any manufacturer). The new look is decidedly different than the generic Clevo appearance, although that understated design was also appealing. Once Clevo launches the next version of the laptops that Origin and several other custom PC builders use, it will most likely ship with a long-awaited backlit keyboard, which is an item that you’ve sort of come to expect when paying $2,000 or more for a custom laptop.

samsung series 7Another new arrival is the Series 7 gaming laptop from none other than Samsung that we mentioned a while back. The folks from Engadget have taken a close look at the machine and it looks promising. An important bit of information gathered is that Samsung plans to release it in the US for a comparatively modest $1,799.

For this you get a powerful Radeon HD 6970M (second best in AMD’s current lineup), a Core i7 CPU, a very bright Full HD display and JBL speakers. With the lid closed, it looks very much like Samsung device–besides the interesting color options–but when you open it up you are greeted by a backlit keyboard and a prominently featured “Turbo” button that clearly states that it’s a gaming laptop (although what it actually does is still a mystery).

On a side note, Razer has also been showing off its elusive Blade (again), with no news in particular to report. A more interesting concept device from Razer is a gaming tablet called Project Fiona that may or may not be released in Q3 or Q4 2012.

Jesper Berg
Jesper Berg

Gaming hardware enthusiast since the 80286 era.

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