WHAT A START it’s been to 2025! No sooner had we gotten over our New Year hangovers, we found ourselves headed to Las Vegas to attend this year’s Consumer Electronics Show—the biggest event of the year for new PC products. We touched on some of these last issue—most notably Nvidia’s 50-series Blackwell cards, which finally arrived well over two years since the launch of the last generation.
We’ve barely been back a couple of weeks, and already we’ve seen the flagship card, the RTX 5090, go through our labs (see our verdict on page 74), be released, and then sell out. As we said, it’s been a whirlwind!
Thankfully, it wasn’t just new GPUs. The promise of AI over the last couple of years has now turned into tangible benefits. The handheld gaming PC market has continued to mature, with countless new models on show. And new CPUs, particularly in the mobile space, have us excited about a future where gaming laptops don’t even need dedicated GPUs.