For a twist that's supposedly along decease's door (hour angle!), the PC sure sprung to life in 2016.
Cutting-edge innovations and boundary-pushing hardware advancements born with shocking geometrical regularity throughout the class, spurred on by the birth of virtual reality, the rise of raw display technologies, and the surprise (to some) resurgence of high-end computing. In a PC industry struggling to tread piss, gamers and enthusiasts are among the some bright spots, and their dedication was awarded with a parade of powerful paraphernalia from companies nisus to woo the whales of the computing world.
Only enough talk! Let's get the picture into the juicy stuff.
VR headsets
Image by XTC Patrick Murray
When the bright-eyed PC historians of tomorrow gaze back at 2016, they'll see it arsenic the year virtual reality finally got veridical. (You know, unless information technology crashes and Burns.) This clobber is psychoactive. And not only did the Oculus Rupture and HTC Vive both hit the streets within a single glorious week this spring, only the long-wooled shadow of VR headsets helped coax Personal computer graphics into stepping skyward their game (which we'll get to shortly).
Of the two major VR headsets our favorite is the HTC Vive thanks to its "room scale" experience, which lets you wander around virtual worlds and actually use your hands to touch and manipulate things in a 15×15-foot physical space. Don't baffle me wrong: Full Vive and Rift setups cost $800, and we don't recommend to the highest degree people buy them—yet. Only this fantastical technology whispers promises of all sorts of revolutionary experiences and use cases, both in games and in more practical scenarios, and I'm convinced it'll brand a eternal mark on the humanity.
Intel's 10-core beast
Visualize by Gordon Mah Ung
Intel's CORE i7-6950X is the world's first-ever 10-core processor for consumer use, and it packs per-nucleus overclocking As well American Samoa a new Turbo Boost Max 3.0 feature that identifies which CPU core is the "best" and runs it at a higher clock speed than the others for orca single-rib application performance. Merely put, information technology's a teras. What more needs to be said?
Well, that it launched with a staggering $1,723 damage tag. That's enough for a Breach and a Vive. Living on the hemorrhage edge isn't cheap, especially when Intel has nary real competition in the calculation graduate-remnant. AMD's new Ryzen processors potty't arrive fast enough.
Nvidia's GeForce GTX 10-serial publication
After years of being stuck on 28nm process technologies, both Nvidia and AMD managed to push their art processors non one, only two full generations forward, to the 16nm and 14nm nodes, severally. The wait was worthy.
Nvidia attacked this untried generation of graphics cards from the high end, revealing the ferocious $600 GeForce GTX 1080 in Whitethorn. This animate being set new records for power and performance efficiency, trouncing last-gen's lofty Titan X by a full 30 percent in games, and its GTX 980 predecessor by some 70 pct. That's looney.
Wait, that's non crazy. The monstrous new $1,200 Titan X Pascal is weirdo, coming in a full 30 percent faster than even the GTX 1080. Information technology's the first graphics card capable of playing modern games at full 4K resolution—with every graphic bell and whistle cranked to 11—and maintaining the hallowed 60 frames per back gold common.
To nitty-gritt up Nvidia's GTX 10-series graphics cards in two language: mic drop off.
AMD Radeon RX 480
Image by Brad Chacos
That mic bead didn't encompass the most mainstream graphics placard segments though. AMD's new RX 400-series graphics cards targeted the decisive sub-$250 price point with the Radeon RX 460, Radeon RX 470, and Radeon RX 480. While the Radeon RX 470 offers uncertain comparative prise and the RX 460 was rendered borderline obsolete by Nvidia's GeForce GTX 1050, the Radeon RX 480 was a game changer—literally.
At that place's never been a $200 graphics card that offers the raw operation of the 4GB Radeon RX 480. Not only backside AMD's card hit 60fps at 1080p at Ultra settings, it delivers blamed fine 2560×1440-resolution results too, and crucially, is powerful decent to drive VR experiences. Before the RX 480, you needed to shed $350 or more on a graphics card capable of supporting virtual reality. AMD's new champion redefined what's possible with a $200 artwork card.
Mobile GeForce graphics
Image aside Gordon Mah Ung
For the first time ever, Nvidia's laptop computer graphics chips don't carry a special "M" appellation. That's because, for the number one time ever, Nvidia's laptop art have achieved performance parity (inside 10 percent) with their desktop counterparts thanks to the insane mightiness efficiency of the GTX 10-series' Pascal GPU architecture. (Remember what I said about the mic discharge?)
That power is enabling all sorts of laptop use cases that simply didn't live before. Now, you lavatory cop a GTX 1080-equipped laptop that can actually play at 4K answer—or a sleek 4-pound GTX 1060 notebook that quieten packs enough firepower for flawless 1080p gaming and even realistic-reality experiences on the road.
OLED laptops
Image by Adam Patrick Murray
Drop-dead gorgeous OLED displays have been along TVs for a while now, but the stunning display engineering only successful its debut connected laptops like the ThinkPad X1 Yoga and Alienware 13 in 2016. OLED screens are sharper and much energy efficient than traditional LED displays, but the secret sauce is in their contrast: OLEDs reproduce a great deal richer colors than LCDs, and deep, dark blacks that make an LCD's black look grey by comparison.
You can read upwardly on the specialized differences in this fantastic OLED vs Light-emitting diode priming by our sister site TechHive, merely you won't truly understand how spectacular Organic light-emitting diode displays look until you see them in real life. More please!
Mesh routers
Image by Michael Brown
2016 was the year when several companies reimagined the basic tenets of home networks, emotional "mesh electronic network" routers that bank on a team of single smaller devices to broadcast Wi-Fi throughout your house, rather than a monolithic central router. Early contenders enclosed Eero and Luma, but the best mesh router we saw was the bu named Google Wifi, which eliminates murdered zones like a champ and makes home electronic network management dead perfoliate with an assist from the crowd.
Spacious SSDs
Picture by Gordon Mah Ung
Storage drives constantly pushed new boundaries in 2016 as well, with SSDs expanding to sizes that were once exclusive to traditional toilsome drives.
The squealing-water mark? Samsung's 850 Evo, which offers a bountiful 4TB of repositing capacity while still heartwarming information about at speeds that borderline saturate the SATA port. Enterprise users fanny snag SSDs full with ever greater riches, look-alike the Samsung PM1633a delineate above. IT crams in a whopping 15.36TB, for a reasonable-as-humongous $10,000 (or more!) price tag.
Speedy SSDs
Samsung didn't just make SSDs bigger in 2016—it made them faster, too. Witness the awful 960 Pro, a PCIe SSD that marries Samsung's stacked V-NAND density with the NVMe specification. If all those commercial buzzwords make your school principal spin, the exciting tl;dr is that the 960 Pro destroyed all sorts of records in tests by AnandTech, Technical school Report, and ArsTechnica, all of which heralded Samsung's drive as the quickest SSD ever discharged.
SSDs in GPUs
What black art is this? In July, AMD announced new professional graphics cards wadding "solid-state graphics" technology—essentially falsetto-cannonball along NAND memory grafted directly to the GPU core group. Today's pro graphics card game max out at 32GB of onboard RAM, but AMD says SSG tech leave give up the company to connect terabytes of memory. That North Korean won't make a difference to gamers, just could be a stake changer in productive and business settings, where all that extra memory can, for deterrent example, make period of time redaction of 4K-and-ascending telecasting more than less cumbersome.
Seagate's super hard drives
Image by Gordon Mah Ung
Traditional hard drives aren't taking the threat of mammoth SSDs sitting down. A mere hebdomad after Samsung disclosed its plus-sparrow-sized 850 Evo cubic-state campaign, Seagate unwrapped the 10TB Seagate Barracuda In favou—the largest consumer hard drive ever free, and our Full Nerd podcast's pick for the best computer memory of the year. The Barracuda Pro didn't conscionable come through on size alone, either. It's actually surprisingly fast for a traditional disk drive, too.
Seagate didn't stop there. The company as wel squeezed a whopping 5TB into a portable disk drive that can be hopped-up over USB, as well as into a melt off 2.5-in drive for laptops.
Enthusiast-sort AIOs
Image by Gordon Mah Ung
PC enthusiasts have long reasoned each-in-one PCs a joke. Hard-to-upgrade machines with laptop-quality components? Pfah, no thanks. That stigma lifted within reason in 2016 American Samoa boutique Personal computer builders rolled proscribed muscular all-in-ones with zero-compromises desktop hardware (like Intel's aforementioned Core i7-6950X and Nvidia's beastly Titan X) and the ability to upgrade at least some of the components—though the tight internals can still be a nuisance. Systems like the Origin Omni and Digital Storm's Aura are sincerely the first-ever fancier totally-in-ones, and we were glad to see them land this twelvemonth.
AMD Bristol Ridge Apus
AMD's mainstream Bristol Ridge Apus—which intermingle compute cores and Radeon graphics on a single chip—emphatically aren't supported the new Dose architecture, relying instead on AMD's older Power shovel CPU excogitation. You fundament't even buy the APUs standalone yet, only in prebuilt PCs. But Bristol Rooftree gets a nod hither for being the first series to support AMD's new unified AM4 socket, which will household everything from subaltern APUs to the beefiest Ryzen chips as it rolls out nut masse shot in 2017.
Adios, convoluted days of AM2, AM3, AM3+, FM2, and FM2+ sockets for assorted products. Hello, AM4!
Full Nerd's picks
Image by Adam Patrick James Murray
That's information technology for our look back at the powerful, portentous PC hardware of 2016, but if we've whetted your appetite for superior gear, be sure to retard dead episode 12 of PCWorld's Full Nerd podcast, where Gordon, Brad, and Hayden epithet their picks for the top-quality PC train and games of the year. What was our favorite graphics card? How about our favorite laptop and PC? Watch and find out.
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Graphics Cards
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Brad Chacos spends his days digging through desktop PCs and tweeting too some.
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