CES 2017: Day Zero Roundup – The Pre-Show Coverage

It’s that special time of year where journalists and tech enthusiasts descend on Vegas for a non-stop week of everything new and shiny that’s to come out over the next year. It’s a big event, hosted over several hotels and show floors, and pretty much impossible to cover everything – but we’ll try.

This year, our CES coverage has been sponsored by Kingston, who just so happened to bring out a new flash drive. We have fond memories of the first large DataTraveler drive Kingston brought out way back in 2013 – we say fond, but the response when we broke the news, crashed our poor little site! Thankfully, that didn’t happen this time with the new model.

Kingston’s latest DataTraveler Ultimate GT packs in two whole terabytes of storage in your pocket on a little two-inch stick, doubling the capacity from 2013. You can read up the brief news piece we did yesterday for more details.

Intel lifted the hood on probably the worst kept secret, the Kaby Lake desktop launch. We posted our review of the i7-7700K to go with it, but the launch covers much more than a single CPU review. A new chipset was announced which introduces greater control over overclocks, media and codec acceleration for the entire 7th gen Core series, plus something called Optane Memory. Even a new K-Series SKU i3 processor was annouced for some hardcore dual-core overclocking.

The Kaby Lake launch is a little bit of a let down for enthusiasts, as the desktop CPUs are basically Skylake with a clock speed increase – but this is arguably tied to the issues of shrinking manufacture process down to 10nm and still getting a reasonable yield. Things are getting tricky, so there are no more free gains from a die shrink.

ASUS is bringing its STRIX branding to the motherboard market. These include a wide range of boards for all price points and aim to deliver that premium but slightly understated charm. With dark color schemes, carbon-fiber detailing and accents of programmable light – the STRIX boards are quite delightful. We’ve already got a board in for review, but alas, CES is upon us, so you’ll have to wait.

On the mobile front though, the 7th Gen processors are being well received, and are already being sold, including overclocked Laptops.

Yup, we’re bringing this bad-boy up again, the Acer Predator 21 X. Think of every killer feature you can have in a PC, then cram it all into a laptop. This thing is obscene… in a good way of course. A curved, ultrawide, 21-inch IPS G-Sync 120Hz display, dual GeForce GTX 1080 GPUs in SLI, an overclocked Kaby Lake CPU, 64GB RAM, a switchable numpad/trackpad, two NVMe M.2 slots, plus two more SATA for storage. The list just goes on and on.

While technically it’s a laptop, you’ll be hard pushed to use it as a mobile device, since at full power, it’ll probably burn through the battery in less than an hour. Also, all that hardware comes in at one hell of a price – just shy of $9000. It’s big, pretty in its own way, drool-worthy performance, but a price tag to match.

If that’s a little too rich for your blood, then NVIDIA is preparing to launch its new mobile focused GPUs in the guise of the GTX 1050 and Ti edition GPUs. These are being shipped to system integrators, so expect to see these GPUs fairly soon.

The GTX 1050 and 1050 Ti cards are NVIDIA’s current entry-level GPUs under the 10-series branding. These are the same chips as the desktop parts, so no M tag on the end. Pricing for such laptops are expected to be in the $600+ range, but you’ll more likely see higher priced models initially. You can read our review of the GTX 1050 to get some idea as to performance.

Logitech is bringing out a new mouse that aims to keep things simple – the G203 Prodigy. Designed to be unimposing and straight up pure functional, it lacks a lot of the bells and whistles of its higher-end siblings. This is not to say it’s ‘budget’, but definitely budget friendly.

If you need a little more zing in your mouth and spring in your step… and RGB in your eyes all the time, then Patriot is bringing out a new range of peripherals under its Viper branding. So many buttons and RGBs. Two new mice, two new keyboards, three new headsets, there’s a lot going on.

While that concludes things for now, there will be a lot more coming over the next few days. A few more items will be added to this by the end of the day, so stay tuned for more. This is gonna be another long week of press crazy news releases and inspired tech products.