A year is a long time in PC gaming tech, and the past twelve months has produced a ton of new hardware for the PC Gamer team to get its metaphorical teeth into. So what if we haven't had a new generation of graphics card this year from either Nvidia or AMD, there have been new processors from both AMD and Nvidia, we've seen the birth of Windows on Arm as a genuine thing, and gaming handhelds have gone from strength to strength, too.
And while we're talking about mobile gaming, 2024 was the year that gaming laptops finally started to grow up. It's also been the year that Asus stole Razer's lunch when it comes to the most wanted of gaming laptops, supplanting the Blade machines as our collective objects of desire. Razer's going to have to up its game in 2025 if it wants to take back the crown, and I've heard tell that we might have something to see at CES in January.
Asus also came back from a customer relations nightmare, with bricking ROG Ally handhelds and mega repair fails, to turn its RMA line around and also release a refreshed Ally X device that rocketed to the top of our list of best gaming handhelds having fixed all its faults, and contained other little improvements, too.
Nvidia also refreshed its GPU line with the RTX 40-series Super range, addressing faults of its own making with the original cards. Most obviously on the pricing of the RTX 4080 and the performance of the RTX 4070 Ti. But while Nvidia and AMD didn't bring anything fully new to the GPU table, Intel did at least get its first Battlemage graphics card out before the end of 2024. Though, from my own testing, the Arc B580 could have done with a little more time in the over running foul of our benchmarking test suite and making the unreliable GPU a tough one to recommend right now.
We've also seen some fantastic peripherals cross our desktops this year, too, and Keychron has owned the keyboard market for sure. It's been a great year for hardware, so let's get on with celebrating the absolute best hardware 2024 had to offer.