CES 2017: Gaming mania from Razer, MSI, Acer, and NVIDIA

eSports and gaming have been making a lot of noise in recent years and big events like CES have taken notice. This year, there have been a lot of products for the gaming segment of the tech market, and a lot of them deliver great features and powerful hardware to enable you to play your games at the highest possible settings.

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Razer

Just because you can build an awesome thing doesn’t mean you should. That’s what most people thought when gaming giant Razer unveiled Project Valerie, a massive gaming laptop with–get this–three displays. The chassis for this monster is a Razer Blade Pro but with the lid reworked to house three 17-inch 4K display monitors. The two side displays slide out with the touch of a button or via software and snap into place, giving you a crazy widescreen set up when you need to playing Overwatch in serious mode. The laptop will have a built in NVIDIA 1050 graphics card and yes, it comes with Chroma RGB lighting effects to go with all your other Razer peripherals.

Acer

Not to be outdone, Acer’s Predator line has released the mother of all insane gaming laptops: the 21 X. First off, it weighs 8kg. To justify the weight, Acer put in five cooling fans, a mechanical keyboard, two NVIDIA GTX 1080 SLi graphics cards, and an Intel Kaby Lake Core i7 processor in there. The screen? A 21-inch IPS curved display. It can handle up to 4TB SSD storage and 64GB RAM and a numpad that flips over to turn into a touchpad. It costs around P500,000 because who needs a second-hand 2015 Honda Jazz (based on average resale value) when you can have this beast breaking your itty-bitty laptop table, right?

MSI

Taking a more modest approach to gaming–but not sacrificing specs–is MSI’s Titan Pro gaming laptop is still their flagship product but the company offered something new for gamers on a tighter budget: the GE series of laptops. These babies come with 4K display capability, Core i7 Kaby Lake processor, NVIDIA’s GTX 1050 Ti graphics card, an SSD + 1TB HDD storage combo, and up to 32GB RAM.

MSI also outed its new line of gaming motherboards. These sport a more militarized aesthetic, but doesn’t scrimp on performance. The boards are optimized for Intel’s latest Kaby Lake processors, come with the company’s own take on RGB lighting effects, and are VR-ready for the early adapters. The Enthusiast, Performance, and Arsenal series of MSI motherboards will be flying into the country very soon.

NVIDIA

Perhaps the company’s biggest announcement wasn’t hardware-related, but cloud-based. NVIDIA’s GeForce Now program will allow both Windows and Mac users the ability to access a Pascal-powered PC via the cloud, which is more than enough to handle your chosen game’s graphics processing. By hooking up your Steam, GOG, and Origin accounts to GeForce Now, you can play your account’s games using any of NVIDIA’s graphics tech, so even low-powered PCs and Macs can play AAA titles at max settings. The downside of this–at least locally–would be that the service is cloud-based, so ISP speeds will apply.